Everyone knows the key to successful healthcare marketing on Facebook is getting “Likes,” right? Not exactly. The Huffington Post ran an interesting commentary today titled The Like War, offering 9 steps for “using social media strategy for long term business strategy.” The focus of the commentary was essentially how to get “Likes.” Ultimately, your goal in healthcare social media marketing should not be to get “Likes” but rather to engage your audience, driving them to your brand service or product. Here’s Quaintise’s 3 top reasons why physicians need “Likes.”
1. Targeted Website Traffic: If you’re not utilizing social media to specifically send targeted traffic to your website, you’re wasting your time. Facebook advertising allows you to target an exact demographic, right down to their zip code, income, interests, hobbies, even medical conditions, to an extent, all of which you, as the physician, should be using to send targeted traffic to your website. While many SEO’s will tell you that getting conversions is a numbers game - the more traffic you drive the higher conversions you will have - in reality it’s all about driving the right traffic. In essence, you can drive all the traffic you want from Houston, Texas, but if your business is in Los Angeles, California that won’t do you much good.
2. Increased Engagement: Besides driving targeted traffic to your physician’s website, your second goal should be to increase engagement with those targeted Fans. I had a client ask me the other day, “We have X amount of Facebook Advertising budget. Shouldn’t we be sending all of that traffic to the website?” Yes and no. Sending targeted traffic to the website is tip number one, but let’s say, for example, that targeted traffic does not need your healthcare services at that moment, so they bounce from the website and in a month when they do need your services they’ve forgotten all about you. no, let’s say you’ve targeted that Facebook user for increased engagement and “Likes” on your Facebook page. In a month or two, when they do need your services, they will be a Fan of your page, engaged with your posts, and know exactly where to go to schedule an appointment at your physician offices. Increasing engagement will keep your medical practice in plain sight.
3. New Fans: A side effect of increasing engagement is getting your Friends of Friends engaged with your website. Each time a Fan or patient of yours engages with a post, photo or update that you’ve made on your Facebook page, there’s a pretty good chance that their Facebook network will see that engagement, thus increasing the amount of eyes you are reaching. Each engagement on your Facebook page increases the Views on that specific post, which increases the likelihood that you’ll end up with new Fans. And while these Fans aren’t as targeted as the ones you get in step one and two, this side-bar Fan, or Friends of Fans, are probably located in the same area, perhaps even same zip code, as your Fan, thus they could be potential patients.
Getting yoru brand out there for the world to see is great, but targeting your world to those who will truly be interested in your services or product is even better. Let the team at Quaintise turn up the heat on your Facebook Page, increasing it’s EdgeRank, increasing engagement, and ultimately driving traffic to your website.