For many healthcare marketing teams, social media can feel like a constant battle against changing algorithms, shrinking attention spans, and pressure to produce more content. But for the team at Optimum Healthcare IT, LinkedIn has become much more than another marketing channel. It’s a business development engine, a thought leadership platform, and one of the primary ways they educate healthcare organizations while showcasing the expertise of their team. That approach has helped Optimum grow its LinkedIn community to more than 220,000 followers and recently earned the team the 2026 Swaay.Health Award for Best Use of Social Media. I recently got to sit down with Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer, and Dani Patterson, Director of Marketing Operations and Events at Optimum Healthcare IT to get a behind the scenes look at how they transformed the company’s social presence over the past decade and why their strategy is about far more than simply posting more often. Conversation Takeaways Create educational content that solves real problems instead of promoting products. Repurpose every asset into multiple formats and posts. Invest in building employee thought leaders alongside your corporate brand. Plan ahead, but stay fluid enough to adapt to trends and industry news. Sustainable social media growth comes from consistency, not always viral moments Here are a just a few of the biggest lessons from the conversation. Start with Education, Not Promotion Rather than treating LinkedIn as a place to simply promote services, Optimum focuses on answering the questions healthcare leaders are already asking. Whether it’s advice on an EHR implementation, cloud strategy, ServiceNow, or another healthcare IT challenge, their content is designed to give the audience something useful. Blog posts become infographics. Whitepapers become checklists. Subject matter experts share lessons learned from real-world experience. As Larry explained, “We’re really just taking our experience across the industry and presenting it in a way that makes sense.” The goal is to create the kind of content someone can actually use, something they can save, share with their team, or put into practice. Dani describes it as giving people “tools in their toolbox” that they can pull out when they need them. And increasingly, that educational approach has another benefit: it aligns with the way people are searching for answers through ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI-powered platforms. One Piece of Content Shouldn’t Be Used Once One of the biggest mistakes marketers can make is spending hours creating a great piece of content, sharing it once, and moving on. Optimum takes a very different approach: A single blog post might generate six or more social posts, each highlighting a different idea, question, takeaway, or audience. Podcasts can generate weeks of content. Existing whitepapers can be transformed into entirely new campaigns. Dani describes the strategy as “reduce, reuse, recycle,” explaining, “We usually put something out there 8, 9, 10, 12 times in totally different formats.” That doesn’t mean copying and pasting the same LinkedIn post over and over. It means finding new ways into the same valuable content so it has multiple opportunities to reach the right people. For Dani, the repurposing also happens while the content is still fresh. When she creates the initial social post for a blog, she often creates four, five, or six additional posts at the same time and immediately adds them to the content calendar. Build People, Not Just the Company Brand Optimum’s strategy also extends far beyond its corporate LinkedIn page. The marketing team actively works with employees and subject matter experts to help build their individual presence on LinkedIn—particularly around major industry events. As Dani put it, “People perform better than a faceless organization.” Ahead of large healthcare IT conferences, the team begins planning months in advance, identifying subject matter experts who can contribute to the conversation and helping them create content for their individual networks. Instead of simply telling employees to post, the marketing team helps develop the messaging and strategy alongside them. That approach gives Optimum access to something its corporate following alone can’t provide: highly relevant audiences that its experts have already spent years building relationships with. It’s also helping position those employees as recognizable thought leaders in their areas of expertise. Consistency Beats Perfection Of course, hearing that Optimum sometimes posts once or even several times a day can be intimidating for marketers working on smaller teams. Dani readily admits that maintaining that cadence requires planning. Optimum generally plans its social content at least one month ahead and, when possible, two or three months in advance. But that calendar isn’t meant to lock the team into a rigid plan. Their philosophy is simple: fluidity over flexibility. As Dani explains, “You may have a goal to post every day. You may have a goal to post twice a week. Whatever that goal is, it’s okay if you miss something.” The important part is continuing to work toward consistency while leaving enough room to respond to what’s happening in the industry. For Larry, the results have reinforced the importance of simply staying visible. “When we started posting every single day, that’s really when our growth shot straight up because we’re staying in front of people.” Growth Doesn’t Happen Overnight Perhaps the most important takeaway from Optimum’s story is that there wasn’t one viral post or campaign that suddenly changed everything. When Larry joined the company in 2016, the company had just over 4,000 LinkedIn followers. Roughly two years later, that number had doubled to 8,000. The growth accelerated as the organization invested in more content, earned executive buy-in, involved more subject matter experts, and continually adjusted its strategy. Today, the company has more than 220,000 LinkedIn followers, a LinkedIn newsletter with approximately 70,000 subscribers, and an average engagement rate Kaiser says is significantly higher than broader LinkedIn benchmarks. But Kaiser is quick to emphasize that their success took time. “It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s a process.” The team kept experimenting, adjusting, and learning until they discovered what worked for their company and their audiences. And that may ultimately be the most useful lesson for other healthcare marketers. There isn’t one LinkedIn playbook every organization needs to follow. Know your audience. Create genuinely useful content. Give that content more than one opportunity to succeed. Empower the people inside your organization. Stay consistent, but stay fluid. And most importantly, give the strategy time to work. Learn more about Optimum Healthcare IT.
