The Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare Connects with its Citizens on Multiple Channels

The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) is a Finnish research and development institute operating under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. They need to share key healthcare information as clearly as possible while also responding to questions and comments on social media. THL is a large organization of 1000+ employees that works in various fields of health and wellbeing, touching topics spanning from birth to the afterlife. THL’s social media management has always involved various employees, and during the COVID-19 pandemic the social media team grew even bigger. Therefore, they needed a way to easily share information between the team members and make social media management easier for everyone.

Unified platform saves valuable time

The role of communications towards the public has been emphasized during the pandemic, and social media has been the best way for THL to reach and interact with its citizens. Despite the overwhelming volume of comments and messages across its channels, THL systemically goes through all the incoming feedback to have a full understanding of what is being shared in its channels. They mark the status of every comment, making sure that everyone working with social media is always on the same page and no work is duplicated. In addition, they aim to answer as many questions as possible.

“The time-saving aspect of Emplifi has been inarguable,” added Malena. “We can now do everything on a single platform without needing to switch through sites that all have different properties when it comes to publishing content, tracking notifications and reporting data.”

Testing and monitoring content for multiple channels

Social media is also an effective and cost-efficient way for THL to target messages to specific audiences. In 2020 alone it had 89 social media campaigns, for which it was crucial to actively monitor the engagement. THL wanted to establish a consistent tone of voice and social media presence in every channel, and to ensure that messages are tailored for each channel accordingly.

THL develops and tests concepts on how to create engaging and uniform content. Emplifi enables them to test these concepts in a very agile manner, providing instant feedback on what is working in each channel.

“Our preliminary results show that content created under our concepts is continuously more engaging, which works as valuable evidence in our social media trainings and helps us to develop our concepts further,” said Malena.

Additionally, in the social media era, THL is faced with the challenge of ensuring the strong visibility of fact-based information when trolling and misinformation are on the rise. The social media team is able to clean THL’s channels from misleading information and links systemically and quickly by using Emplify.

Making social more conversational

Social media is reshaping the way THL thinks about communications, from one-way messaging into a more conversational process, and these conversations are taking place not in one but several different platforms. COVID-19 has been a great learning process in modern governmental communications, and THL’s next big mission is to take these best practices into its everyday work and other topics so they can maintain the interest of the wide following they have gained during the crisis.

THL can easily follow the success of each post when there is quickly accessible, comparable data from each channel. Additionally, engaging with the audience is much more streamlined thanks to the community functions of Emplifi.

The takeaway

Emplifi played a critical role in helping THL efficiently manage the significant increase of activity because of the COVID-19 pandemic and enabled reliability in managing the flow of messages and comments on social media.

Do you need help managing your social media activity? Are you sharing information between your team members efficiently? If you would like help managing your social media program, schedule a demo with an Emplifi expert today.