Social Media Marketing For Medical Professionals

In the early 2000s, social medial was beginning to bud, and an effective social media marketing strategy was extremely easy to pursue. So few businesses saw the value in participating on social media, that simply having social media accounts for your business was enough to give you an edge on the competition. However, now that Facebook has more than 2 million users, it’s harder than ever to stand out on social media.

In this section, we’ll describe the benefits of medical social media marketing, and offer some insight on how to make sure your medical practice succeeds in the tricky world of marketing with sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and more.

Is Social Media Marketing Important for a Medical Practice?

Despite the fact that more than 30% of millennials use social media to engage with their favorite brands at least once each month, it is often questionable how significantly niche businesses can benefit from being active on social media. We’re here to clear up the confusion and explain what certain trends indicate about the usefulness of social media for medical practices and physician offices in particular.

To put it plainly, your medical business must have a social media presence, but it won’t need daily engagement to succeed. Simply existing on social media isn’t enough, but overdoing it won’t garner any additional benefit for your business. Social media marketing is very particular for medical practices, but once you have the basics down, it’s significantly less complicated.

How Your Social Media Presence Improves Your Visibility Online

The reason your business needs to have a presence on various social media sites is that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing currently use social media accounts to verify the validity of a business, regardless of the industry. This means that having a solid social media presence can positively impact how search algorithms regard your website in terms of authority and value.

So how does this work? To start, all of your social media accounts ask for the same basic information: the name of your business, the business address, and the business phone number. It’s essential that all of your social media accounts display the same exact information, written in a very specific way. This in one of the initial things the crawlers will look at when determining where to rank your website.

Your social media marketing campaign should be centered around reinforcing, as well as broadcasting the information already on your website. This will signal to the algorithm crawlers that your online presence is uniform for users on several different platform, which improves the user-experience, and ultimately improves your business’ visibility online.

What Kind Of Social Media Posts Should I Make?

Now that you know your website needs to have social media accounts, it’s important to know which platforms you need to be present on, as well as which types of post to make on those platforms.

The primary platforms that will help improve your visibility are:

• Yelp
• Google/Google+
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram

While you don’t need to use all of these accounts, the more that you have, the more comprehensive your online presence is, and the larger the audience you can reach is. As a medical practice, your social media accounts won’t need to be publishing daily posts, or anything of that nature. However, you will need to keep your social media accounts well-groomed with weekly or monthly attention.

Let’s have a brief overview before we get into the nuanced steps. As a general rule, you will want nearly all of your posts to direct the audience back to your website. Think of your website as the core of your web presence, and remember that all of your social media accounts revolve around and feed into your website.

As long as you are making regular additions to your website, as we discuss in the content marketing section, your social media posts can be taken directly from those additions. Essentially, every time you add content to your website, you can post the link to that new content on your social media.

All of your posts should include a relevant picture, as well as an effective call to action, encouraging the reader to click the link and continue reading the content on your website. Also be sure to use social media posts to announce any changes to your practice’s regular schedule. If your business is moving soon, or if you will be closed, or open, on a holiday, utilize social media to get the word out. Such simple posts show consideration for your clients as well as potential clients.

Last but not least, be sure to respond to comments on your business’ social media accounts. An essential part of social media marketing for medical practices is engaging with clients, and building brand loyalty. Be sure to respond to any comments and reviews on your social media accounts, good or bad. You can learn more about how to respond to comments and reviews in our social media section!

How To Create Your Medical Social Media Marketing Strategy

Now that you know why social media marketing for your medical practice is essential, we can go over the steps you need to take to create your ideal social media strategy. Bear in mind that these steps do take time to get in place, and we understand that some physicians are simply too busy to keep track of their online presence. If you need help creating or implementing a social media marketing strategy for your medical practice, you can count on the experts at Web3MD to assist you! Contact us now to find out how we can improve your medical practice’s online presence and ranking on search engine result pages.

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