| SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING | PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
video vignettes of treatments or a doctor giving a talk about the newest injectable.
2
Content is king The objective should be to create content that people care about and want to share. The more interesting your content is, the more
engaging it will be for your fans and customers. Posting endless updates about new products, sales, and special offers, or other promotional news is not going to cut it anymore. Social media users are more sophisticated than that and they resent being sold to 24/7. The ultimate goal is to engage your customers and
give them something that they actually want, and that they cannot get anywhere else. Informative, entertaining, and well-presented content updates with the right balance of words, hashtags, visuals, and links is what it takes to grab their attention. Think of what types of content appeal to you. Humour is always a good choice. Social media engagement relies on daily interactions
among users. While it is fine to use tools to help you with the burdensome task of posting, engaging with your audiences in real time is still the most effective way to grow your audience. So, use autoposting platforms to help you with the basics, but do not rely on this tactic for all of your social media channels. For example, Facebook allows you to schedule drafts and posts, which is a neat tool and can be a major timesaver. Social media users also expect to get a response very quickly to a comment, complaint or question. Setting alerts to notify your community manager or page admin when a new comment is posted can help facilitate this process. Facebook now rates your response times on the right
of them. New platforms and mobile apps seem to crop up all the time, but that does not necessarily mean that they are worth your interest unless the users are among your target patient audience. For example, if your clinic attracts mainly patients interested in anti-aging treatments, you will do best on Facebook and may skip Instagram, since the average Instagram user is under 30. In my view, Facebook is still the biggest of all the
A well-executed social
media strategy will enable your clinic to cut through the clutter and stand out from the crowd.
platforms and the place to begin if you can only manage one. Twitter is among the best platforms through which businesses can interact with customers. YouTube and Google+ are important, as both sites are owned by Google and they rule the online world. But constant rumours of more changes coming for how G+ is used make us wonder if the effort will pay off in the long-term after a somewhat rocky road. YouTube is all video, which makes it more difficult for clinics to use without creating original video content of their own. The video options now offered on other channels may prove to be a good alternative. Some relatively new platforms that aesthetics doctors are dabbling in are streaming video apps, like Periscope and Meerkat. However, it remains to be seen whether aesthetic clinic patients will join to watch
column of your business page. Twitter users require an even faster response rate because the platform is primarily used on mobile devices and is a real time feed. Furthermore, it is a good idea to repost content more than once, especially if it performed well and even if it didn’t. You can also repurpose your content by changing a graphic or a link or tweaking the words and hashtags. It may also be helpful to reach fans and followers at different times, in different time zones or days of the week. You may often find that just making a few small changes will get better engagement with your audience. For help with scheduling posting, look into Hootsuite.
com or
Sproutsocial.com, both can greatly improve efficiency when posting to multiple platforms.
appealing and thus, will achieve more impressions, shares, likes and comments. Numerous studies have shown that a social media post with an image or other visual gets 70–80% or more engagement compared to a post with only words and no image or link. Even tweets with images have been shown to get much higher rates of retweets.
3
prime-journal.com | October 2015 57
Visuals, videos, and links enhance your content A picture speaks a thousand words. Content that includes an image is typically more
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72