How can you create and maintain a personal touch with your social media posts?
Although it’s true photos on Facebook Pages receive 53% more Likes than the average post, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include several different post types on your social media channels. Below are a few examples of posts that work really well to create engagement, loyalty and a sense of connection with your patients.
Highlight Community Involvement / Events
Odds are, at some point throughout the year your medical practice is probably sponsoring or participating in some sort of event. In addition to putting the time in at your event, be sure to grab a photo or two (especially if your physicians are present) to share on social media. If you don’t take a photo, it didn’t happen.
The key is to show that your practice is a member of the community and you are volunteering your time outside of the office. Some posts that work well:
- Volunteering with nonprofits
- Dropping off holiday / back to school donations
- Health fairs
- Sponsorship and partnership announcements
Share Facts About Your Practice
This one works great with or without a photo. Dig through your practice history and share a bit about your office or your physicians to engage your followers. Remember: fans and followers like your page because they like your practice, so they’re probably open to learning interesting facts about you.
Highlight Your Doctors
File this one under “no-brainer”. One of the best posts you can do involve highlighting your physicians. Photos are optional here, but they work well. Alternatively, you can link back to the physician’s bio page on your website and allow the social media channel to pull their headshot or a video from the page.
Some of the posts that work well here include:
- Little known facts about the physician (musical talents, hometowns, etc.)
- Education history
- Health tips from the physician
- Practice differentiators
Specialty Facts
Don’t have anything interesting to say about your office? Don’t worry. Representing a medical practice means you’re an expert on something many folks around the community don’t know anything about (well, hopefully anyway). Your fans and followers are interested in your office and your specialty, so take this opportunity to educate them.
With a few minutes of Google searching, you can find plenty of facts, figures and interesting tidbits about your specialty to share with your followers. And, to help personalize the post, remember that this is social media, not a peer reviewed medical journal. It’s OK to throw in a pun or two and have some fun.
Sharing Patient Testimonials
One of the easiest ways to maintain a personal touch with your social media posts is to highlight the people that keep your doors open: the patients. Most patients take it upon themselves to comment and share the photo (everyone needs their 15 minutes of fame after all), which will put your practice in front of their friends and family as well, drastically increasing your organic reach.
One thing we suggest is reusing content instead of reinventing the wheel every day. In the example above, we took a still from a patient testimonial video. This video becomes several pieces of content over its lifecycle:
- The YouTube video
- A blog post of transcribed text from the video
- Still photos for social media
We simply grab a still of the video, add a quote from the patient and the practice’s logo and then post. These do wonderful, and when reviewing insights, we see that they perform well for an extended period of time as the patient’s friends and family will continue to notice and comment on the photo when seeing it on their page.
Interesting Articles that Relate to Your Specialty
Sometimes, coming up with original content just takes too much time. This is a good time to share a news article with content relating to your specialty. Add a personal touch with your caption to the content for added engagement.
When there’s a timely event, news article or announcement, sharing it on your practice’s social feeds is key to earning the most engagement.
Luckily, news sources make these as easy as possible and have links to “Share” content from their respective pages. All you have to do is select your page, create your text caption and press the “Share” button.
What Did We Miss?
What are some of the other ways you maintain a personal touch with your social media posts? Share in the comments and let us know.
