Stop Treating Healthcare Social Media Like a 24/7 ER

Why a Social Media Manager Is Rewriting the Rules for Digital Well-Being

Robbie Schneider, Enterprise Social Media Manager and Blog Content Strategist at Franciscan Health, has been thinking deeply about the emotional weight of working in digital spaces, so much so that she published a book: Social Media, Sanity & You. Her focus isn’t on content or engagement metrics but on the real strain that healthcare communicators carry. She shares simple and effective strategies to address this burden.

Key Takeaways

1. Your social team is not a 24/7 command center. Always-on expectations drain focus, blunt creativity and erode performance. Treat social monitoring like clinical work: staffed, scheduled, and bounded so people can actually recover between shifts.
2. Stop doomscrolling in the name of “staying on top of things.” Swapping constant monitoring for set check-in times cuts down on anxiety and emotional fatigue while still keeping your team responsive when it matters.
3. Give social teams the same psychological safety you expect for care teams.
   Digital trauma is real, especially when local crises or harsh comments hit close to home. Leaders who normalize stepping back, tagging in support, and tapping internal resources make it safer for people to say, “This is too much right now.”

Your Social Team Is Not a 24-Hour Clinical Unit

Healthcare marketing often mirrors clinical urgency without meaning to. A complaint at 10 p.m. sparks a text thread. A trending story at sunrise can spin up anxiety before the first cup of coffee. Schneider has watched the toll this “perpetual readiness” takes on social teams, especially in healthcare where stakes feel high by default.

“Just as a surgeon doesn’t work 24 hours a day, neither should your social teams,” stated Schneider.

Her message: Build healthier expectations for social media responsiveness in healthcare organizations.

Limit the Doomscrolling Before It Becomes the Work

Schneider’s team treats heavy news cycles with newsroom discipline rather than reactive scanning. Instead of refreshing feeds all day, they check them at set times and rely on monitoring tools for the rest. It’s a small shift with a big impact.

“When it’s a very heavy news period, our team only checks the news and the feeds a couple of times a day,” shared Schneider. “That way we’re not getting sucked into that real-to-reel of trying to catch up.”

The restraint helps protect focus and protects people from the emotional vortex that can easily become the job itself.

Normalize Asking for Backup Before Burnout Sets the Rules

The hardest part of this work is how personal it can feel.

“If you need to step away or if things are getting too heavy, you take a walk,” said Schneider, referencing the coping mechanisms she has put in place for her team. “I’ll step in and help.  We have these resources at our disposal if we need them.”

A spike in negativity or a crisis unfolding close to home (think a hold-and-secure situation at a school in the community) hits differently when you’re the one reading every comment. Schneider’s advice focuses on naming those triggers, checking in often, and removing any shame in stepping back.

That last point is easy to say, but difficult to achieve. According to Schneider, it is important that social media and communication leaders advocate for creating psychological safety for the people behind the organization’s digital presence.

Why caring for your digital teams strengthens your brand and your community

The conversation around social media in healthcare is changing. Leaders are acknowledging the emotional cost of negativity, the pressure of constant visibility, an