Facebook allows people to connect with each other online. Whether it be your friends, family, clients, or whoever else, you’re on Facebook to connect with them. So, in order for Facebook to be a useful healthcare marketing tool, you need to be reaching your clients effectively.
There are two ways in which your posts on Facebook can reach individuals – organic reach and paid reach. Paid reach occurs when unique viewers are shown your Facebook post as an advertisement. Organic reach occurs when unique viewers are shown your Facebook post due to unpaid distribution.
While advertisements are an important aspect of medical marketing, Facebook engagement is most effective when it enables clients to interact with your practice more genuinely. So, you should focus a bit on your practice’s organic reach as clients are generally much more willing to engage with unpaid posts rather than paid ads on Facebook.
Of course, that is much easier said than done as many businesses struggle with increasing their organic reach on Facebook. While there might not be any set rules on how to boost your organic reach on Facebook, there are certainly various guidelines that will help you increase it. So, here are some tips for how to boost your practice’s organic reach:
Focus on cultivation strategies that have helped brands grow on Facebook –
There are a few distinct qualities in posts from successful Facebook brands, and fostering these qualities can help boost your practice’s organic reach as well. The three main cultivation strategies are:
1. Transparency – Showing what goes on inside your practice can be one of the most effective ways to connect with your clients as it can make them feel like insiders.
2. Accessibility – Showing the availability for clients to reach, connect, and interact with your practice is crucial for Facebook success. Let them know that your Facebook page is something more than a superficial aspect to some business.
3. Positivity – Make sure your practice’s Facebook clearly shows efforts to maximize the clients overall experience.
Other important qualities your Facebook page should aim to cultivate are:
· Networking – Make sure that your Facebook shows shared interests with your clients
· Assurance – Make sure your clients know their concerns and interests are always important, valid, and actual to your practice. Collaborate with them to find solutions to problems.
Post at non-peak times
Facebook has certain peak times each day, which is when the most people are on Facebook at a certain time. Previously, people have thought the best time to reach the most amount of people on Facebook was to post during these times, since the most people would be on to see it.
That, of course, seems reasonable, but more recent tips and studies have actually suggested the opposite. Posting during non-peak times has shown to be more effective than posting during peak times on Facebook. While there is no definite reason for this, there are a few reasonable reasons why this would be the case.
First, there’s less people posting stuff during those times, which means less competition for your post being shown to people. Also, posting in nonpeak hours typically results in your post being shown to individuals over a longer period of time since not only will it be shown during inactive hours, but it can also be shown to clients during the following peak hours.
Share original and behind-the-scenes photo of your practice’s team
People like to get to know the faces behind the practice. Just by posting pictures of your team and photos from various behind-the-scenes activities, like team members at a special event, you can make your Facebook page feel more personal for your clients.
People are often more willing to engage with a post if they feel more connected to the actual people posting and running the practice. Give your clients something to connect with. This falls right in line with cultivating transparency.
Engage the Facebook community with questions and common posts
Don’t make your page all business. An easy way to engage your clients and have them comment or share your posts is by posting quick, engaging questions or common posts that people might want to share with their friends, such as inspirational quotes.
You don’t want to bog down your clients with too much information and practice-related posts, so lighten up your Facebook page with questions and quotes, which will likely result in some level of engagement.
Share self-explanatory pictures and videos
Since people scroll through Facebook posts for interesting posts, you want to make sure your posts catch their eyes and have an obvious message. The simplest way to do that is to post pictures and videos of your message in a way that gets your message across in an obvious manner.
Infographics work very well for this purpose. Regardless of what it is, though, just make sure the picture is clearly relevant to your message and obvious to your client.
At the end of the day, there are no set rules that will drive your organic reach on Facebook besides doing the little things that will increase how connected clients feel to your practice. Managing healthcare social media can be tricky, but just make sure your posting quality content for your clients. Don’t make the mistake of using Facebook as a platform to post advertisements – make sure your engaging with your clients in whatever works well for your practice!