Do you know what to do once patients actually start interacting with your social media accounts? What’s the best strategy to earn and keep engagement?

By now, we hope your office has set up the social media channels that make sense for you. Whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or YouTube, ideally you’ve set up your profile and you’re interacting with the 91 percent of online adults who use social media regularly, according to Hubspot. 

A client of ours recently asked a question that’s often overlooked so we thought we’d share our answer to their question:  

“What do I do when someone comments on my practice’s Facebook page?”

Now, for the purpose of this post, we’re going to expand Facebook to include any of the social sites and share some of the tips and ideas we use to respond to patients when they interact with us in the social media world.

Phase #1 – Have a Content Plan

The whole point of interacting with patients online isn’t to make you feel good about how many people you know (really, we don’t care). The point of interacting with patients in an online or social environment is to generate leads, cultivate potential patients and ultimately put their butts in your exam rooms.

To do that you’ll want to create a two-phase plan that accomplishes a few key things.

Creating the content plan will also help you craft responses and prepare when someone interacts with your practice’s social media profiles. Phase one should include creating a content and publishing plan that:

• Builds Off of Quality Content – The more quality content you have posted on your blog and you share through your social channels, the better your chance for increasing your organic page rank thereby showing up higher in search engines and ultimately garnering more clicks.
• Positions You as an Expert – That same content will also help position you as a leading expert in whatever your specialty is in the area. If you’re everywhere and you answer lots of questions, you must know what you’re talking about, right?
• Engages Your Audience – By providing this relevant, useful content you’ll also be engaging your fans/followers/patients/haters/etc.

Now, of course those are just the broad strokes of what the first phase plan should entail. We’ll cover more of what your plan should entail in future writings.

As you come up with your content, make a note of questions, answers and references you came across while writing. That way, if it’s ever asked, you can produce everything you need to respond quickly.