Social media marketing is an incredibly effective marketing tool for doctors, dentists, and members in every area of the healthcare industry. When used correctly and consistently, it can demonstrate a business’s success, increase brand awareness, and generate patient leads. A strong social media marketing strategy can also help to build relationships between patients, physicians, and other medical staff. Your healthcare practice should focus its efforts on social media in order to build the credibility and personability of your physicians as experts in their fields.
In order to implement a successful social media strategy for your medical or dental practice, you first need to understand the different social media channels; this will help you find the right fit for your business.
The Most Popular Social Media Platforms For Healthcare
With a user base exceeding 1.3 billion, Facebook is one of the top marketing strategies for the healthcare industry. It can help you build brand loyalty, collect patient reviews, and generate new leads for your medical practice. Facebook allows you to target the exact audience type you want to attract to your practice through demographic targeting. Through paid advertising, Facebook’s algorithm can attract whatever age, location, interests, and income level you are searching for in your leads. For these reasons, Facebook can be an outstanding social media marketing tool for all medical practices and specialties.
Instagram users connect with videos and images; this makes this visual marketing tool highly suitable for surgeons and dentists. Physicians can use Instagram to engage with patients and share procedures, results, and their practice. For Instagram marketing to be effective, your healthcare professionals should post daily, customize graphics, and target local or new patient leads. Here at Atlantic Health Marketing, we know that your physicians are extremely busy, so we can help you generate and post content that will be both engaging to potential clients and profitable to your business.
Twitter facilitates news, article, and general information sharing in an effort to direct visitors back to your website. With the generation of unique and consistent content, healthcare businesses can become respected leaders in their field and this leads to public relations success. Hashtags and graphics are a must for your Twitter posts, as this will increase client engagement and the odds that a potential customer finds their way to your profile.
Perhaps one of the most professional, under-rated sites in the business world, LinkedIn is the perfect place to promote your healthcare business’ successes and achievements. The benefits aren’t unique to the healthcare community, but LinkedIn can be used to share related medical business news, articles, and promote interactive relationships between colleagues and practices. This platform can also be used for developing B2B business networking relations. In addition, LinkedIn’s wide selection of business profile preferences can help your healthcare business’ local search rankings and professional connections.
YouTube
It is important to have a wide variety of content available for your website. If you already have video content, setting up a YouTube channel is highly recommended. This allows you to backlink to your website and refer clients through animated or interview-type content. YouTube can be an extremely effective marketing tool when used to your company’s advantage. For example, your physicians can record and share original content such as medical procedures, information on recovery, FAQ about diseases and diagnoses; the sky really is the limit, just don’t forget to link each video and your profile to your company website!
Pinterest is a social media platform for image sharing only; these images, called ‘pins’, are posted on personal or group ‘boards’. 81% of Pinterest users are female or Millenials, so if your healthcare business is interested in this demographic, Pinterest is a great platform to get started with. To create consistent brand continuity you should regularly post unique images and content related to your practice. This amount of new content will help increase your pins’ visibility and drive patients to your website to generate leads.
Picking The Right Platform For Your Practice
As social media platforms evolve and change, our strategies must also be fluid. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest can help your business reach out to new patients and consumers, build a bigger name for your brand, and increase the trust that your clients have in their healthcare professionals, but they’re not a one-size-fits-all social media solution for every practice. There are tons of social media platforms available to use, but in order to get the most bang for your buck you should be focusing your efforts on the channels that work best for your practice’s specific needs.
If you’re a radiology group, a visual platform like Instagram might not be as effective for you as it would be for an aesthetic-based group like a medspa. Conversely, your plastic surgery group probably doesn’t need to be putting a lot of time and effort into posting on LinkedIn. Start by getting a strong understanding of what you do, who your target audience is, and the platforms that they’re most likely to be on, then build your social media strategy around that.
Regardless of which platforms make the most sense for your practice, make sure that you’re always striving to be innovative and find new ways to leverage social media to your advantage. If you need help with that, our healthcare social media experts are here to help utilize social media for your benefit! From guidance about which platforms you should use to profile setup, social media management and post creation, follower growth, paid social campaigns, and social media analytics, our team is here to help you engage with your patients and generate new leads through social media marketing.
Contact us today for more information about how we can help your business succeed!