Don’t Feed the Trolls and Other Helpful Social Media Tips for Practice Managers
Social media and how to use it to your advantage is tricky enough to figure out as an individual, let alone a business. How do you respond to a negative review or comment? What social media platform is best for businesses? Is it even really necessary to have social media as a medical practice? These questions and more brought local practice managers together on Wednesday, August 14th at the CMA building for a luncheon on how to leverage social media to market a practice, engage patients and serve the community.
The guest speakers were Tandi and Ryan Squire. The married duo are principals at marketing company, further.faster and each have over 15 years’ experience marketing and communicating in the healthcare industry. Tandi started the discussion by stating social media is “a place and a voice for small businesses like never before.” It’s a way for patients to find practices and physicians as well as get answers to their questions they might not have been able to before. Tandi continued by saying “social media is all about human relationships, if you take the ‘media’ out, it’s just social…a human aspect.”
Then Tandi and Ryan launched into the presentation on how exactly a manager could approach social media when they’re already busy running a practice. Here are the top 8 tips:
Know your audience – What kind of practice do you run? Who are your patients and their demographics? Knowing who will look at and look for your social media is the first step in creating an impactful online presence that gets you noticed with the right people
Choose the right kind of social media for your business – With so many to choose from it can be hard to decide. But, going back to tip 1, knowing your audience helps. Click here to view a chart on what demographics are on what social media.
Content is king – Once you have your platform(s), you have to fill it with content. People log on to social media to consume content and making sure you are telling your practice’s stories in a meaningful way is essential.
Everyone likes video – Seriously, everyone, young and old, loves video. It is that eye-to-eye connection that is missing in traditional social media that makes it so appealing. Most of us now have smart phones with high definition cameras so creating videos that promote your practice is easier than ever.
Reviews do matter – People trust reviews more than ads on TV or branded websites. So, understanding and listening to your reviews is important to maintaining a successful business.
Assess + Evaluate before responding to posts, comments, or reviews on social media – People usually only comment or write reviews if their experience was extremely great or extremely awful. But, knowing when and how to respond, especially to the negative, is the first step in righting any perceived wrongs. Check out this nifty flow chart Tandi and Ryan made for the meeting that guides you through when and how to respond online.
Set up google alerts – This handy tool, emails you every time a phrase of your choice (e.g. your practice name, names of your physicians) is written about online. You can use it to monitor what is being said.
Create and enforce a social media policy – This is vital so your employees are also aware of how to respond online and what should and shouldn’t be said.
The next practice manager luncheon is on October 9th, click here to register.