2 Key Ingredients to Market Your Clinic Successfully on Facebook

The time is now to re-think your clinic’s social media marketing strategy…..especially when this involves Facebook.

Practice owners/managers, flock to Facebook in droves to lead their clinic’s online marketing efforts. We’ve naturally taken to Facebook en mass to market our products, services and news. Why not…it’s perfect to reach all those patients and extended networks right?

The new reality is….we might be sadly mistaken!

Facebook recently confirmed what many of us have long feared- Reach of your posts is on the decline and this won’t be changing.  This shouldn’t be completely surprising given the rise of ‘paid for advertising’  and ‘promoted posts’. This is the reality we face. Since Facebook’s IPO, the social networking giant has been placed in a position whereby it is required to bring in the $$$$$ for investors. This bunch strongly “disliked” it when it started trading well and truly below its offering price.

 What does this all mean to you the practice owner/manager?

–       Facebook isn’t the same cool and “free” networking tool anymore

–       Reach of your clinic’s posts ‘organically’ is on the decline

–       Facebook is prompting you to pay to have your posts promoted and seen

–       A huge user base extends to business ‘pages’, meaning Facebook sees value in charging page owners for their services

–       You are competing with other similar clinics offering the same type of services

–       People are spending more time on the net, meaning content is being published in enormous amounts (i.e. your opportunity to grab people’s attention is very small)

Example: Consider one of your page fans logging on to Facebook. That person is a fan of another 20 exercise, physio, medical, pilates, etc pages. All of you post content on the same day, of similar content type. All of these photos, stories, offers, etc could appear on that person’s news feeds at the same time…but they don’t.

What can I do about it?..I want to promote my clinic and want my patients to see what I post

The key thing to understand here is that Facebook filters news for people’s feeds based on “quality of the content”. Quality alone doesn’t mean much. It depends on a lot of things (i.e. likes, uniqueness, freshness ). For more info read here. I’m sure you have some great research, patient information, news and offers your patient’s will benefit from. Take note. As mentioned above, the impact/success of the content you post to your Facebook page will be a combination primarily of 2 key ingredients – “quality” and “engagement”. Don’t be fooled. Many of you might think that by posting all 10 of those photos of your pilates studio (instead of 1 or 2), or, posting that play-by-play 15 post commentary of your weekend working at the local football club might fool Facebook into thinking you’re engaging. i.e. carpet bombing in the hope your post gets seen. You’d be wrong! Facebook’s tricky algorithms will quickly figure out your content is of low quality and bury you under all the other hopeful posts.

Next time you plan on posting a message to your target audience, think to yourself, how can I write something that will truly resonate with people, that they’ll “like”, “comment on” and “share”? Of course, increasing the volume and quality of posts is great but why not try and work on the latter first. Take time to research your material, target your influential audience members and produce something that will truly be of interest and use to people. You might be surprised the outcome.

Do you have any examples you can share? What works for you? Any advice for others out there? Send through a message or pass by twitter @merollim

If you’d like more information on how to make Facebook work best for you, contact to find out how illorem can help

Mark Merolli, illorem

@merollim

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