This is part 3 of my 3-part blog series on how to effectively use social media for your healthcare business. Read part 1: Social Media and Healthcare: 5 Myths and Facts About Building a Private Practice and part 2: How to Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Private Practice.
Social media is a powerful tool to grow your healthcare business in the long term, but if used poorly, you can end up repelling potential clients, looking unprofessional and hurting your healthcare brand.
Every social network has a different culture. Each platform has significant differences in the way they work that you need to know. It’s important that you understand these differences so you can utilise these tools effectively and efficiently to reach your audience and build your healthcare business.
For the purpose of this post, I will mainly be focusing on Facebook and Twitter, though many of these concepts will also be applicable to the other major social media platforms, including LinkedIn and Google+.
Here are my 24 tips for success when using social media to market your healthcare business or private practice:
#1 Be Clear on Your Social Media Goals
As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s essential that you start with the end in mind.
What are your goals for being on social media? If you just jump onto Facebook or Twitter with no clear purpose or intention, you’ll find yourself suddenly getting nowhere fast and wasting time.
Your goals will then inform how you manage your time on your social networks, as well as the what content you share and how you interact with your followers.
Having an intention for your social media activity helps you get really clear on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
#2 Research Social Media Channels
Another important early step is to work out which social media channels you want to use. There are lots to choose from and it may serve you better to be selective in the beginning rather than create an account on all the major players and then find yourself spread thin.
I recommend you choose one to start with- possibly the one that appeals to you the most. For me, Facebook marketing was my natural choice because I already had a personal profile I was using to stay in touch with friends and family, so the move over to a business page was not too confronting.
Twitter has not come so naturally to me, however, over time I have begun to realise that it too is a very powerful platform. In fact, most the work and projects I’ve gained from social media originated on Twitter, so it’s important not to discount any platform too quickly.
#3 Observe to Understand Your Audience
To begin with, you might find it helpful to just observe the social media network you have decided to use. The screenshot above is from my Hootsuite interface that I use to monitor my social media networks. When you’re in observation mode, notice how people interact. What’s the culture? What are the norms for communicating? What kind of language do people use?
Start by following similar professionals in your niche. If you’re a therapist, follow other therapists and thought-leaders in your field. Watch what they say, how they say it and when they say it. Immerse yourself in the culture of the network.
There’s also a great opportunity here to tap into the social networks of the clients and patients you serve. Observe and listen to what they are saying. What are their struggles? Where do they need help? What challenges are they facing in their lives?
I’ve always thought that social media is the greatest free consumer research on the planet. As you start to better understand the clients and patients you serve, this then helps you tailor the content you’re offering in a much more focused way.
#4 Curate Interesting Content
You may have come across the buzz word ‘content curation’, which refers to the process of searching, collating and sharing interesting content that’s related to the target audience you serve.
Becoming an effective curator of content has a number of benefits:
- people look to you as a provider of valuable content
- the content you share helps define your brand
- you become known as an authority in your niche
- people share your content, which exposes more people to your content in a viral way
- you build trust and credibility in your community
- you become a trusted resource of information that helps people
- you can strengthen relationships with other professionals that can be mutually beneficial
Content curation is one of the most important tasks for me when I use social media. I love sharing valuable information with people and I’ve found that it benefits my business and brand in the long run. It’s a win-win.
#5 Consider Your Posting Frequency
This is where I see lots of healthcare professionals get it wrong. Every social network has unspoken guidelines about how to use the platform and interact with others. I think of this as the culture of the platform that has evolved over time, but is also closely related to the way the particular social media network works.
For example, Twitter is a very fast-paced social network, where breaking news, events and interaction occur in real time. If you’re following many hundreds, or even thousands of people, it’s not unusual to watch your Twitter stream of the people you’re following be continuously updated in front of your eyes.
The nature of Twitter means that news moves fast throughout the network, and for this reason, it’s OK to use a higher posting frequency. It would be quite OK to post between 10-20 or even 30 updates on Twitter in a day, if they’re spaced out.
However, Facebook moves at a different pace. The nature of the news feed in Facebook and the culture that has evolved means that information moves at a slower rate. Personally I wouldn’t update my business page more that 3 times a day, and I tend to make 2 posts a day at the most- one in the morning and one in the late afternoon.
One of the most frequent mistakes I see therapists doing is what I call the ‘social media marketing binge’. They will post 3-5 updates all in a row- one after the other- and then have no interaction for the next 24 hours. What they don’t realise is that they’ve just clogged up the news feed of the people following them. It’s unlikely your 5 posts will be read but it’s highly likely that you’ll be unfollowed or hidden from the news feed or the people you irritate with this strategy (but the way I didn’t read those 5 business related posts on Sunday night either).
If you have lots of great content that you want to share, use a tool like HootSuite to schedule your tweets throughout the day so they’re posted when you’re not able to be online.
#6 Invite Engagement
If you haven’t heard, even if you share content on your Facebook business page, there’s no guarantee that people will actually receive your update in their news feed. This is due to the algorithm that Facebook uses called Edgerank.
The Edgerank algorithm decides how many people will see your post, based on previous interactions and engagement on your business page.
Engagement includes people liking, sharing and commenting on your content. If you have very little engagement on your business page, it’s likely many people are not seeing your posts. So for this reason, you need to be creative and invite people to engage with you.
Here’s some simple tips to do this:
- ask a question
- have a call to action e.g. ‘Like’ if you agree with this
- ask people to fill in the blank e.g. The best thing about my weekend was __________(fill in the blank)
- post a controversial article
- use captivating photos and images
Are you getting the hang of this? So inviting engagement is not only good for increasing the social proof of your page, but it helps increase the viral nature of getting your information to more people.
#7 Be Bigger Than Your Niche
I see a lot of healthcare professionals use social media to broadcast information specific to their niche. This is great- I’m always excited you’ve chosen a niche and you’re passionate about your area of practice.
But there’s a danger here…The danger is you may ONLY post about your topic.
As much as I was interested in finding out more information about anxiety because maybe I thought I was suffering from this issue, I actually don’t want to be clobbered over the head with tonnes of articles, news and blogs about anxiety. In fact, that’s just pretty boring and gets very monotonous in a short amount of time.
This is where you need to be creative and get bigger than your niche. Try to think outside the box and introduce other content that people might find engaging or interesting. Your niche might be helping people overcome anxiety, but that doesn’t mean you can’t post a funny picture and make them laugh, or maybe add an article indirectly related to anxiety, but is more current affairs and news.
Are you getting the picture here? Try not to be myopic about your area of expertise and expand your content in a creative way.
#8 Inspire and Motivate
One of the most effective ways I’ve found to increase engagement on the Australia Counselling and Relationship Matters Facebook pages, is to share content that inspires and motivates people.
The reality is most people go on to Facebook and Twitter to be social and interact with their followers and to be entertained. Someone doesn’t tend to go online and think ‘I want to keep up-to-date with that business I’m following.’ Not likely.
For this reason, source content that touches people in an emotional way. You might want to consider:
- inspirational quotes
- images with a motivational quote
- sayings that tap into the core issues of the people you work with
- uplifting words that offer encouragement and support
This is where you can be really creative and enjoy yourself. Who said that social media for business can’t be fun?
#9 Be Consistent
One of the most important strategies for interacting on social media is to be consistent. As I mentioned, particularly on Facebook there are benefits for being consistent and inviting engagement to harness the viral power of sharing. But there are also benefits in being consistent with your audience in terms of building loyalty, trust and credibility.
Consistency with your engagement on social networks helps you build trusting relationships with your followers because they expect to receive your high-quality content over time. And when you deliver that content consistently, this builds relationships.
Building relationships through social media is the cornerstone of building your brand and your business.
Also be consistent with your language between the different social networks. For example, Twitter has it’s own unique language including words like ‘via’, ‘RT’, abbreviations and # symbols for tagging. For this reason, I don’t recommend that you connect your Twitter stream to automatically update your Facebook stream. The other issue here is that your posting frequency will probably be too high for the Facebook culture as well. Use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to post different messages to the different social networks.
#10 Share Your Own Content
Now I’m guessing by this point you’re having a great old time sourcing, collating and sharing all the wonderful content of others. And you’re establishing yourself as a valuable resource for quality content and information. But what about your own content?
Don’t forgot to share your own content! This is one of the most powerful aspects of using social media to build your healthcare business, but if you leave out your own content, you’re leaving out your voice.
Here’s some ideas for your own content to share:
- share your own blog posts and articles
- share reports and white papers related to your niche (great for establishing credibility)
- share announcements about your events, groups and workshops
- share your press releases (but only write a press release that’s actually news-worthy)
- share links to your business videos, audio interviews and any other online multi-media
I’m sure you can come up with more ideas. Make sure your content is interspersed with the content you’re sharing from others. Keep it balanced and watch out for getting too heavy in one area or the other.
#11 Share Other People’s Content
I’ve already spoken about the importance of content curation. Hopefully you’re putting systems in place so you can start collating lots of interesting information that your community is going to love. Personally, I use Delicious bookmarks for quickly saving and tagging the articles I come across online, as well as Evernote. Both have Chrome and Firefox plugins for your browser, so you can make this process quick and seamless as you’re reading.
Another strategy which works well on Facebook is to log into Facebook as your business page. This can be done quickly in the top right corner of Facebook. This then allows you to interact and comment with other business pages as your business.
The benefit of this is your brand gets more exposure as you engage with other brands. Also, if you’re adding valuable comments and information on other business pages, this again raises your credibility and authority in your particular niche. You’ll also likely find that your followers increase the more you engage with other pages.
#12 Use the 80/20 Rule for Self-Promotion
This is a core principle that I use in all marketing, whether I’m promoting a group, workshop or my services. It also works really well on social media.
The 80/20 rule is simply 80% of the time you contribute to the conversation with valuable information and content that is related to your niche- either content produced by you or others- and 20% of the time you self-promote. I’ve grabbed a screenshot above of a self-promotional tweet within my Twitter stream.
As a general rule of thumb, I would only have 2 status updates or tweets related to something I’m offering- such as a training, group, workshop, product- for every 8 tweets or status updates that are content that is valuable and interesting to my followers. If you’re self-promoting more than this ratio, there’s a good chance you’re losing followers.
Following this rule will keep people coming back to you for more content and spreading the word about how awesome you are. 
#13 Be Humorous
This can easily be overlooked when you’re working so hard to build your community and source valuable and interesting content. But the truth is, it doesn’t hurt to be humorous. In fact, I think it actually helps a lot.
Most people go onto social media to be entertained or get some light relief in their busy day. If you can be part of the light relief in their day, this can be very beneficial to your business and your brand.
Within reason, experiment with humour and see what gets the best response from your followers. You can also track your engagement with your analytics to see if it’s paying off in the long run. Don’t be afraid to have some fun!
#14 Self-Disclose (Within Reason)
As a therapist and someone who works with other therapists, I know this often strikes the fear of god into us. This is where I think our training gets in the way of us being ‘real’ in a public forum.
I think it’s important for healthcare professionals to disclose on social media, but within your own comfort level.
This was a big barrier for me for a long time and I was afraid to share anything in case I might cross a boundary. However, over time I’ve realised it’s important to inject your own personality into your brand and business. In fact, I encourage my clients to do it.
When it comes to self-disclosure, I navigate this issue by asking these questions before I post:
- would I say this to a client?
- would I say this in a coffee shop and I knew a client could overhear me?
- would I be comfortable with this on the front page of the newspaper or on the 6 o’clock news?
- does this breach anyones confidentiality?
- what and who does this disclosure serve?
I might not always get an answer to all these questions, but I’m heading in the right direction if the answers I do get are benign.
Aside from those questions, I also have some blanket rules I follow for myself:
- Never disclose information about a client
- Never talk about the types of client issues I’m working with in a particular day or week
- Never talk about how my day or week is going with clients
After 4 years on social media, I’m yet to have any issues related to clients and my use of social media by following these guidelines.
#15 Balance Automation with Real-time Interaction
I mentioned HootSuite is a great tool for automating tweets and status updates when you’re not able to be at the computer, and there are other tools as well. I recently went on a holiday and scheduled all my Facebook page updates for Australia Counselling while I was away and was able to maintain a consistent engagement on the page without having to monitor the page.
That said, it is important to find a balance between automation and real-time interaction. If you are automating some of your posts, make sure you check back in later in the day to see if there are comments you need to respond to. This will help you maintain your engagement and encourage more interaction by your followers. And don’t automate direct messages to people when they follow you on Twitter. No one reads them and it’s just naff and spammy.
If you just schedule your posts and walk away, you’re defeating the whole purpose of social media, which is to be social.
#16 Join the Conversation
And on that point, I see that a lot of people forgot that social media IS meant to be social. It’s not a one-way broadcasting service where you dump your information and people respond, or not.
Yes in the beginning it is best to observe for a while. But at some point you need to jump in the water and join in the conversation.
Like any game, if you only sit on the sidelines, you’re not going to kick any goals. You might feel like it’s a bit risky to start with, but I’m pretty sure that with time and experience, your confidence will increase and you’ll enjoy seeing the business benefits from being social.
#17 Use Images
Images are one of the most powerful ways you can engage people on social media. If you haven’t noticed, that’s why Pinterest, the newest social media player on the block is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.
Images can touch people deeply on a number of levels, even without any words.
I use images consistently on my Facebook business pages with an inspirational quote, a statement or a question. I also try to use images with any text post I make, as the research has shown that adding an image to words gets significantly higher engagement.
#18 Share Video
Video is another way to increase engagement on social media. On Facebook, if you put a video link, it will generally play within the Facebook newsfeed, which keeps people engaged on your post and increases the chances of them interacting via commenting or liking your video.
Don’t forgot video as a powerful way to curate content related to your expertise. A search on YouTube or Vimeo will generally turn up thousands of videos that you can use to post on your social networks. Also, use a call to action to ask people to interact with your content as this will increase the number of people taking the desired action.
#19 Continuously Add Value
This is my mantra on social media. I ask myself ‘how can I continue to add value to my followers?’. When you come from this mindset you are on the way to creating loyal and interested followers who look forward to receiving your content and your updates.
This, of course, has numerous benefits as I’ve touched on already. The more your followers know, like and trust you, the greater the benefits for your business and your brand.
#20 Deepen Relationships Online and Offline
As you continue to add value to your followers, make sure you also deepen your relationships online and offline. One of the ways I have deepened the relationships with some of my colleagues on Twitter is I have requested recorded interviews with them for the premium content area of the Australia Counselling Directory.
This has been a great way to get to know some of my colleagues better and deepen our relationship. Interviewing my peers has been a wonderful way that we can benefit each other. I promote the therapist and their books, resources, workshops and trainings to the Australian therapists, and the therapists on Australia Counselling get to receive interesting and informative interviews with leading psychotherapists about their theories and methodologies. Again, it’s a win-win.
If possible, meet with colleagues that you meet online in social media in the real world to strengthen and deepen your professional relationship offline.
#21 Grow Your Followers
An important ongoing task for social media success is to grow your followers over time. There are a number of strategies you can use to do this, including the ones I’ve mentioned in this post.
Here’s some ideas for you to consider:
- have social media icons on your website to encourage people to follow you
- invite people at the end of a blog post with a call to action to follow you
- have calls to action in your newsletter asking people to join you on social media
- follow people back who follow you on Twitter
- use Twellow to find people in your niche on Twitter
- use Twitter search to find related people in your community
- use Facebook sponsored story ads to increase the number of likes to your business page
- add a Facebook like box to your website or blog
This will get you started. Any others you’d add to this list?
#22 Use Facebook Advertising
I’ve had great success with Facebook advertising. In particular, I’ve used the extremely targeted advertising to show ads for groups I’ve run to specific populations in a specific location.
Facebook ads are the most targeted advertising available on the planet today. You can refine your ad placement by city or country, gender, marital status, interested in men or women, interests, education level and age.
I’ve found that Facebook ads work best when you’re wanting to target a very specific population, but are less successful when you’re targeting a general population.
They are relatively cost-effective and worthwhile experimenting with if you’re wanting to promote a specific product to a very specific population.
#23 Measure Results
Now you’ve put in all this work you want to know if it’s being effective. Well Facebook has some amazing analytics for you to measure your results with. It’s called Facebook Insights and provides a tonne of valuable information about your postings.
You can see from the screenshot above that I can see extensive data on every post I make. The data includes:
- Reach: the number of unique people that have seen the post
- Engaged users: the number of unique people that have clicked on your post
- Talking about this: the number of people who have shared, liked or commented on your post
- Virality: the percentage of people who have engaged with your post out of the unique people who have seen it
Once you get used to reading this data, you can then see what posts have the highest level of engagement and reach. This information can then help you in your healthcare social media strategy going forward.
#24 Analyse, Adapt and Repeat
So you’ve got your data, you’re analysing what works and what doesn’t work. Now use that information to adapt your approach and repeat what works.
For example, if you’re noticing that updates with images are getting higher virility and engagement than those without, then use more images. If inspirational quotes are getting higher engagement than your articles on ADD, then increase your quotes.
I’m not saying don’t have your ADD article there, but just know the higher the engagement and virility of your Facebook page, then the more people that will then see your ADD article when you choose to share it. Make sense?
Have I missed any tips here? What works for you on social media? Share your tips with us below.
Related articles:
Is Social Media for Therapists all it’s Cracked up to be?
Warning: What Therapists Need to Know About the Facebook Subscribe Button
7 Reasons Why Your Healthcare Website Isn’t Getting you Clients
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