A Research On Hospital WeChat Public Platforms' Promotion Strategies

With the rapid development of public social media and the in-depth interactive integration of internet and other industries,“Internet + Health” has begun to exert greater influence onto the public since 2013. In 2014, hospitals at all levels began to establish their own WheChat Public Platforms and in that year different types of medical APPs also sprung up. Online health care has continued to be a hot spot attracting lots of public attention till 2016. Today, the developing model of Internet Health is still under constant exploration, which includes not only public hospitals' exploration in promoting their online medical services, but also includes endeavors from commercial Internet medical field, such as the typical business model of Chunyu Doctors, WWW. DXY.cn, Yao.Tmall.com,etc.. But when China's current health care institution and system are taken into consideration, pure commercialization as a way to promote mobile medical care is obviously difficult in practice. Therefore, the development of hospitals' WeChat Public Platform can actually facilitate users to accept and experience the convenience brought by internet health in an easier way, which is also a key step forward to advance internet medical care in a large scale. Along with the massive establishment of hospital WeChat public platforms is a series of problems associated with promotion and other aspects.In this paper, a review of different hospitals' WeChat public platforms will serve as a starting point and then the promotion of such WeChat public accounts will be carefully explored. All of China's large AAA hospitals are now having WeChat public platform services, with their functions mainly focused on appointment and register, hospital navigation, doctor arrangement and information, content delivery and so on. Due to the large number of WeChat users, originally influential and comprehensive hospitals enjoy a faster increase in users and a greater number of pageviews in the process of their accumulation of original users and promoting their platforms. WeChat's convenient ways of forwarding messages also help to create better dissemination effect of the contents delivered by different platforms. The forwarding of daily medical information and contents is a socially beneficial way of emotional expression in Internet communication. Although it is quite important for hospitals to establish WeChat public platforms in an "Internet +" era to spread medical information, what is more important is to let users experience and use the mobile medical clinic services by themselves. According to statistics, the successfulness of a hospital's promotion of its public platform affects to what extent its users would accept the mobile medical clinic services.By analyzing a number of emerging facts from current unclear developing direction of WeChat to its stagnant promotion speed, the thesis finds three main factors restricting hospitals' WeChat public platform promotion: 1. limited operational team with confined management power due to large public hospitals' insufficient emphasis on public platform management; 2. insufficient interaction with the users, with most of them can only passively receiving publicity messages from the hospital public platform rather than participating in interaction processes themselves because of a limited age of the users and a limited function of the platform; 3. the existence of a stereotypical seriousness of medical industry and the cognitive difficulties in users which are reflected to varying degrees in medical public platforms. Based on the problems identified and current developing tendency of hospital public platforms, in the end of this thesis, the author will explore into the enlightenment on ways to maintain sustainable development and promotion of medical WeChat platforms. The medical and health sector should make an accurate positioning of hospital WeChat public platforms, cultivate high-quality professional operational teams and develop a reasonable operational mechanism for medical public platforms, with new technologies applied in time, new platform functions developed and ways of promotion enriched.Premier Li Keqiang has proposed "Internet +" in 2015 and this new model will definitely integrate into and change lives of all internet users. Medical industry, as one of the most important parts in our social system, should make greater efforts to establish and successfully promote medical WeChat public platforms and see it as a most realistic way to deepen the integration of resources in medical and health system.