A recent study, “US hospitals on YouTube™: a test to the Altruistic marketing approach,” author Edgar Huang, PhD demonstrates the important marketing role that YouTube videos play for small hospitals. The study focused on three main questions:

1. How have US hospitals used YouTube videos to connect to their online users?
2. What kinds of hospital videos on YouTube are popular?
3. How have hospital size and ranking affected a hospital’s implementation and viewer reception of its videos on YouTube?

Results show that, for hospitals with YouTube channels and videos uploaded, the average number of views is 23,281. This is significant, as Dr. Huang states 87% of all YouTube videos get fewer than 10,000 views. This shows that patients are looking for health information online and value video as a medium for their healthcare information and education. Hospital marketing executives may be surprised to know that educational and entertainment videos perform better on YouTube than advertising or informational videos. This shows that patient education videos like Nucleus Medical Media’s 3D medical animations can serve hospitals better than advertising-type pieces. Patients are looking to online video like the clip below about breastfeeding for information about their conditions, treatments, and medical concerns:

Dr. Huang calls hospital patient education and PSA videos “altruistic marketing,” and notes that this type of un-marketing performs well for small, regional hospitals: “Smaller hospitals should better take advantage of YouTube videos and… they should better promote such videos.” Nucleus Medical Media has created a model for hospital marketing through patient educational videos like those mentioned in Dr. Huang’s study. Our animations have been used by hospitals across the world for social media marketing, website marketing, and patient education. Dr. Huang’s conclusions show that more hospitals should be taking advantage of patient education and health information videos on YouTube. Nucleus makes patient education marketing easy with over 150 medical animations in multiple languages. Use videos on YouTube and social media, hospital websites, at the point of care, and more.Save

Save