Social Media Specialist, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
As the Social Media Specialist for a nationally ranked children's hospital, I manage multiple high-impact social media accounts, crafting content that connects with diverse audiences while upholding the hospital's mission and voice. I lead strategy, storytelling, and analytics for our primary platforms and serve as a trusted advisor to internal teams and individuals across the organization, helping them navigate and leverage social media effectively.
From ideation to execution, I own the full storytelling process, developing campaign concepts, conducting interviews with patients, families, and staff, writing compelling copy, capturing photo and video content, and analyzing performance metrics to refine future content. My work plays a key role in building community trust, raising awareness for hospital programs, and highlighting the inspiring stories of resilience and care that define our hospital’s impact.
Written Work
Jordan's Story
When Jordan’s flu-like symptoms wouldn’t go away, her family took her to their local emergency room. To their surprise, she was going into heart failure and needed specialized care.
Collin's Story
A two-time brain tumor survivor and Iron Man finisher ran the Chicago Marathon to give back to patients like himself.
Angel's Story
Angel never experienced symptoms of her sickle cell anemia until she was sixteen. Today, she is cured because of the treatment she received at Lurie Children’s.
COMING SOON
Kelin's Story
When specialists close to Kelin’s home in Wisconsin couldn’t treat her throat condition, they sought specialized care at Lurie Children’s in Chicago.
Video Work
TikTok and the Case for an SEO Video Strategy
When I joined Lurie Children’s in 2021, I saw the opportunity to provide informative and factual health content on TikTok to an audience of young parents and young adults. TikTok provided a unique value with its robust search features that would allow Lurie Children’s to succeed in providing informative, SEO-driven content. I pitched a strategy to hospital leadership, which has since driven our short-form video strategy across all social media platforms.
Using keyword research, I developed short-form video content that aligned with our web strategy and served as both an opportunity to establish expertise on the platform and feed into our website.
Results:
Lurie Children’s TikTok channel with over 2,000 followers
SEO videos drive +15k views each month and are still driving engagement years later.
218% increase in video content on Instagram in the first year.
24% increase in video views across all social media platforms in the first year.
Case Study: Podcast Optimization
The Lurie Children’s marketing teams publish podcasts and rely heavily on organic social media to share them with their audiences. After the first year of podcasting, the social media posts did not perform as well as the teams had hoped. The posts did not warrant high engagement, and few users clicked through to listen to the actual podcast episodes.
After reviewing an analytics report of the podcast social media posts, I learned that our intended audience of peers and professionals was not responding to the podcast episodes on our professional-facing channels–LinkedIn and Twitter. The content did not resonate with our audience, and updates to social media platforms made our content display differently than we intended.
Thinking about the user experience of an individual clicking into a podcast on social media, I thought about the three ways people can do so: an in-newsfeed link, a link within a story, or a link within a profile. Understanding our target audience of busy professionals and their needs, I realized that the fewer steps needed, the better.
Making two small changes drastically improved our podcast performance
Instagram was no longer an afterthought. Professionals are still on Instagram and are using it more than LinkedIn. Optimizing the content on Instagram for stories instead of in-feed posts allowed our audience of busy professionals quicker access to the episodes.
Make Social Media Updates Work in Our Favor. Due to updates to posts, link previews changed, minimizing the image within the link preview and changing the performance of our posts. Posting the podcast episodes by sharing an image with a link in the caption performed far better in Facebook and LinkedIn newsfeeds.
Results:
The engagement rate nearly doubled from 2.8% to 5%
Driving 10% more listeners to podcasts