These are marketing tools available on Facebook to help your practice continue to reach and engage your audience.
Boosted Posts
A boosted post means you pay a little money to broadcast a regular Facebook post to your audience or a custom group. Boosted posts start at $1 and have no upper limit. Boost a post if you notice it isn’t reaching a large percentage of your followers or lacks engagement from fans.
Pay-per-click Ads
An ad is an ideal way to share content you don’t want to display it on your profile page. Facebook ads offer a lot of flexibility with setting your budget, targeting, and duration of the ad.
Featuring something specific, such as a new patient special or a new service, is the best way to maximize your Facebook advertising. Ads should send traffic to a targeted web page, not the home page of your website. You will need to coordinate updating your website with a Facebook ad campaign.
Facebook Events
Creating an event is an excellent way to boost your organic reach, and it’s free. If you create an event on Facebook and invite fans, patients, and clients, you’ll get exposed to your audience’s network as well.
When people RSVP to your event, their friends will receive notifications that one of their friends is interested in an event. As the event draws closer, these same friends will receive notifications of the upcoming event.
Regular Facebook Posts
The three types of content you should share on Facebook are evergreen, trending, and original. The exact proportion of each is debatable, but we recommend sharing mostly evergreen content from your blog about your practice or firm. Your evergreen content can feature patient testimonials, practice hours, holiday closures and service. Add trending content once a month.
A social media calendar can help you plan posts for three or six months. People who read books can publish a book review every second Monday—Facebook scheduling lets you publish posts up to six months in the future.
Types of Content
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- Evergreen: Evergreen content is timeless, educational, and valuable. It may not be newsworthy, but it will be relevant even a year later.
- Trending: Trending content provides short-term engagement, but within a day, the interaction with your post will drop off.
- Original: Original content establishes your practice as an authority in your niche. Your content is usually a combination of evergreen or trending topics directly related to your services. Original content helps cultivate real relationships with your patients and give them reasons to connect and interact with you between office visits.
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Encourage Your Clients to Live Well
Clients and patients follow your page because they care about what you have to say. Surprised? You shouldn’t be! It’s important to show the value of your practice instead of just promoting appointments or listing your services. Think about the life management questions you hear over and over. Answer these questions, and your page will nurture a loyal following.
Life tips can help build trust with your audience. Explore delivering these tips in different formats – Facebook Live, videos, infographics – to learn what works best.
Encourage your Clients and Patients to Write Reviews
While a handful of customers will write a review for your practice out of habit, many do not. Invite each person who uses your services to leave a review on Facebook. For example, have your front desk staff ask clients to leave a review before they leave.
You can also send out follow-up emails to people you have a long-standing relationship with. Their loyalty and respect for your practice will shine through any reviews they leave you.
Respond to all reviews, both positive and negative.
Negative reviews are never fun, but 30% of consumers assume online reviews are fake if they are all positive. So don’t worry. It’s normal to get a bad review. Many people only respond to positive reviews, but it’s crucial to respond to both positive and negative reviews of your practice. In fact, Yelp encourages responses to negative reviews on its platform, even though it can be a challenge to do so.
Resolve negative reviews
Responding to a negative review proves that you offer great customer service. Maybe the reviewer’s circumstances were not ideal, but show future patients that you care by responding in a genuine and timely manner.
When you respond to a negative review, it also helps you learn more about what someone was thinking when they left the review. This can become a learning experience that can benefit your overall practice and prevent future negative reviews.
Video
Over the last couple of years, Facebook has shown a preference for video posts over pictures and articles. The reason is twofold:
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- We already know Facebook monitors engagement and genuine interaction. Live videos get up to 6 times more comments and discussion than a pre-made video.
- Sharing Live videos signals that you’re an active participant on the platform, and you provide value to your user base.
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Groups
Many practices create private groups on Facebook, where they invite patients and members of their community to join. Group members get notifications about recent posts and comments (especially if they are friends with other members in the group). A group is an excellent way to ensure a core segment of your audience sees your content.
Refresh Your Facebook Habits
As a local business owner providing a valuable service, this updated Facebook algorithm may benefit and work to sharpen your message. Pages that don’t provide value will be silenced to make room for people who make the platform a better place. Position your practice to be engaging with original content and video on Facebook.
