The Propel 100: The Most Influential Health Communication Professionals in the World 2022
The Propel 100 lists highlight influential PR people in many different fashions. As a team that prides itself in revolutionizing PR, we make it our mission to research and celebrate PR pros that are standing out and leading the conversation today.
Announcing the next wave of the Propel 100 with a twist, this time focused on health communication PR pros!
What exactly is the Propel 100? It’s our way of highlighting influential professionals in the PR industry for sparking positive change and using innovative techniques to get their messages across. It’s a carefully curated list of pros that are standing out and leading the conversation in their sector of the industry.
Each Propel 100 list has its own focus, whether it be on agencies at-large, in-house PR pros only, or those excelling in specific sectors of PR like health communication. We take this chance to highlight specific examples of excellence, overall influence and more. With the Propel 100, it’s our goal to celebrate big things happening in PR and create new opportunities and elevate conversations across all backgrounds.
Our methodology
Today, people heavily consume social media on a daily basis, and it has become an integral part of our routines for entertainment, news and beyond. It’s also a communication channel PR pros especially engage with as a means of carrying out campaigns, leading the conversation and connecting with stakeholder groups.
To begin our search for Propel 100 candidates, we reviewed metrics that can help quantify the influence on these social platforms within individuals’ respective industries. We start with metrics like follower count and engagement rate, but make a point of going beyond these foundational numbers to factor in qualitative measures like profile biography and content topic relevance to arrive at a more well-rounded review in the end,
Some of the metrics that we closely studied to finalize our list of the top health communication influencers include:
- Audience - Total audience size and audience size specific to the PR industry (we determined the PR-specific audience by including users that stated they work in the PR industry within their bio).
- Relevance - Number of times that they tweet or post on topics that pertain to the PR industry.
- Engagement - Average engagement rate per post (likes, comments, retweets, quote retweets etc.).
Another large and trending professional social media hub is, of course, Linkedin, which continues to be a sturdy weapon for the PR and communications industry as a whole. For this list, it’s important to note that “Hospital & Healthcare'' came out on top by reaching the second most dominant industry on this platform for 2021 and 2022. Linkedin metrics that we took into account include:
- Audience - Total audience size and audience size specific to the PR industry (we determined the PR-specific audience by including users that stated they work in the PR industry within their bio).
- Relevance - Number of times that they engage with topics that pertain to the PR industry or health communication.
- Engagement - Average engagement rate per post (i.e., likes, comments, shares etc.).
- Experience - Number of years of professional experience related to health communications PR and/or PR health communications.
Once we find a range of PR pros that stand out by terms of quantitative metrics, we begin focusing on qualitative considerations. This means researching exactly what it means to be considered “influential” in the healthcare communication space.
One of our favorite ways of building a strong qualitative approach to the Propel 100 research process is to consult industry professionals that know first-hand what it means to stand out in the field and make a serious impact.
Lynn PR CEO and behavioral science communications expert Shayoni Lynn comments on what it means to be a health communication influencer beyond what numbers alone can say.
“I think influencers are those who can work in partnership with clients to convince them of the value of strategic communications, the value of innovation, [and] the value of different thinking to deliver outcomes that are measurable and that add value back to business.”
Lynn emphasizes how the most important part of measuring influence is the actual impact someone is able to have on their stakeholders that goes beyond having the largest digital footprint or the highest follower count. For health communication pros, this means using “different techniques, tools and approaches to connect with audiences in different ways to get them to improve their health outcomes,” she said.
And finally, a major component of our research methodology is focused on diversity…
Diversity
At Propel, we value diversity and inclusion extremely highly as one of our core company values and hope this translates well in our list. As many have come to recognize, a diverse team is a wonderful asset for any organization to have. We hope to continue spreading how priceless and important it is to be able to build new, uncapped potential by supporting and welcoming influence from all kinds of backgrounds. We made sure to apply this approach in our research by considering PR pros with countless types of differences, including skill set, ethnicity, ability, and the list goes on.
Insights from our list
What can we learn about health comms PR pros from our quantitative research? The final Propel 100 list sheds light about what it takes to be an influential member in the health communication space today today when using major social media platforms like Linkedin and Twitter:
Followers
We found the average follower count among these pros was 1,885. For the most part, the accounts were quite similar in terms of follower count, but there were a few outliers on both the higher and lower end of this range. One of the largest follower bases from the list is about 15,000.
Followers-to-Following Ratio
The average follower-to-following ratio is 2:1. The ratio was a lot greater in the previous Propel 100 list, but that’s to be expected because this list dives into a much more niche area of the PR industry.
Twitter Experience
The average years of Twitter experience among these professionals is 12 years, with the most at 15 years and the least at 4 years. There’s nothing wrong with a more recent start date, and it’s never too late to start growing a social presence, of course. We see here that it’s important to be patient with social growth, as building an organic social presence tends to be an extremely gradual process.
Number of Tweets
The average number of tweets across these accounts was approximately 5,600. Michael Kempner, CEO and founder of MikeWorldWide, has the highest number of tweets with over 55,000 since joining in 2008.
Location
Over 50 of the individuals on this year’s list are based in the United States while the rest are from additional parts of North America and across Europe.
Bio
A huge chunk of those named in this Propel 100 list include mentions of topics related to their professional experience, adding phrases such as “healthcare,” “founder & CEO,” “passionate about…” etc.
The Propel 100
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