EP #090: Healthcare Has an Unfair LinkedIn Advantage, and Almost No One Is Using It

I was on a call recently with a C-Suite member at a 3,000-person healthcare services company.

Years ago, when we first started working together, she wasn't using LinkedIn to generate leads or build a personal brand. She was trying to hire in the middle of a nationwide clinician shortage, and her company's traditional recruiting channels had stopped working.

So her team tried something different. They made her visible on LinkedIn. 

Over the next four years, she went from 2 posts a month to 12. She published 539 original pieces of content, and her average engagement more than doubled.

In that same time frame, the company’s headcount grew by 26% during the worst clinician talent crisis in a generation. And the posts that drove the growth weren't job listings or company announcements. 

They were personal leadership stories.

The Advantage All Healthcare Leaders Share

Healthcare organizations are built on two things LinkedIn rewards above everything else: mission and people.

And yet, most healthcare leaders default to resharing press releases and FDA clearances, the lowest-performing content categories. It's what feels safe, so it's what gets posted.

Meanwhile, mission-driven content - the story of why an organization exists - outperforms product content by two to three times across every executive we've studied, and people stories outperform company announcements every single time.

These are the stories audiences actually care about. Why a leader got into healthcare. The patient interaction that changed how they lead. What a year of clinician shortages taught them about organizational resilience. The human stuff is what stops the scroll.

Three More Case Studies

The C-Suite member I mentioned earlier is one of several healthcare clients I've worked with. 

Another is a healthcare software CEO backed by PE firms with over $100B in combined AUM. He's a brilliant operator and a credible domain expert - and when we started working together, he had virtually no digital presence.

We focused his content around his perspective: where healthcare IT is going and how technology should serve clinicians rather than burden them. Eighteen months later, he was posting 20 times a month, with top posts pulling 400-plus likes.

Then the company was acquired for over $2 billion. 

LinkedIn didn't cause the acquisition, of course. The product and team were always strong. But when the announcement went out, it reached an industry that already knew who he was - and you can't build that audience at the moment you need it.

Then there’s a healthtech CEO on a mission to destigmatize an underserved condition and make treatment accessible to everyone. His company employs 1,000 people across eight countries. 

His best posts don't talk about the product at all. A founder origin story: 192 likes. A company anniversary: 187. A team member's unconventional path into the company: 164. The millionth patient served: 171.

When his audience reads these human stories, trust starts to build. And once that trust is there, conversations about the product become a whole lot easier, because the company’s mission is already clear.

A third client is the founder of a 50-person medical device startup and a military veteran who sustained a spinal cord injury in combat. His personal story is extraordinary, and the numbers have always reflected it - his first posts about the injury and recovery pulled thousands of likes. 

But he was posting in bursts: 13 posts one month, then three months of silence, with every burst restarting the flywheel instead of building on it. 

Since we started working together, he’s gone from 2.6 posts a month to 5.9, sustained. His average likes are up 21%, and his personal and resilience content averaged 441 likes - 2.5 times his business content.

A Healthcare Leadership Exercise

If you’re in healthcare, pick one leader on your team and check their LinkedIn. When was their last original post? What was the response like?

Then, ask yourself: If someone researching your organization found that profile, would they be more or less likely to trust your company?

If the answer is “less likely” or “about the same,” you’re missing out on a huge advantage that’s built into your industry. And now, you've seen the data on what happens when healthcare leaders tell the stories that define healthcare.

— Justin

Justin M. Nassiri | Founder & CEO
M: 650.353.1138 | E: [email protected]
250 Fillmore St Suite 150, Denver, CO 80206
www.ExecutivePresence.io

Executive Presence specializes in helping top-tier executives boost their visibility, activate their network, and position themselves as thought leaders via our premium, fully-managed LinkedIn service.

Our unique process involves ex-McKinsey, BCG, and Bain consultants conducting monthly hour-long interviews with our clients, and turning them into impactful daily LinkedIn posts to establish their unique voice and authority. On average, our clients see a 500% bump in engagement in their first 30 days with us. Data is continuously analyzed to improve engagement and identify impactful messaging that you can use for conferences, podcasts, and internal communications.