Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust
Engaging patients and their families on social media
The Walton Centre wanted a more strategic approach to engaging patients and their families on social media but needed to work to a very tight budget.
Content and engagement

The challenge
The Walton Centre is an NHS Foundation Trust that delivers neurology, neurosurgery, spinal, pain management and rehabilitation services to patients at their specialist hospital in Liverpool.
Their Communications and Marketing Team wanted to take a more strategic approach to engaging patients and their families on social media, but didn’t have the budget to invest in a costly strategy. They challenged us to find a creative way to help them develop their social media content without making any major investments.
Our approach
We delivered an interactive workshop that provided hands-on training for the team designed to help them focus on creating content that drives engagement. We used data from their social media channels so the team could workshop how to plan, develop and evaluate content based on real insight.
We conducted analysis on two of The Walton Centre’s social media platforms and identified where, when and why their users engaged with them. We also explored content opportunities by reviewing past performance and conducting competitor analysis and social listening.
We developed a framework that would help the team to plan, develop and measure their content. We also provided a set of suggested content principles and strategic content themes, introducing creative exercises that helped them to generate new ideas that would align with their new strategic approach.
The workshop introduced this framework whilst also giving the team hands-on experience of developing social media content and campaign strategies. We followed up by providing a workbook that the team could use to help them when planning any future social media content.
The results
The team have seen increased engagement and reach since putting the learnings into practice, with their Facebook following growing by 17% and their Instagram by 28% over the first year.
What the client said
“It was great to work with the team at We Are MC2 to review our social media offering and how we could work with our followers and teams across the Trust to increase engagement and new and interesting content. We were really pleased with the outcomes of the session and have since put a lot of the learnings into practice, resulting in continually increasing follower numbers and post engagement!”
Elaine Vaile, Head of Communications and Marketing, The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust