Leveraging Social Media For Your Practice

Social media is a powerful tool for medical practices looking to expand their reach and engage with patients. From Facebook’s extensive advertising capabilities to TikTok’s engaging short-form videos, each platform provides distinct opportunities to connect with current and potential patients.

Everybody’s favorite social media site, Facebook spans all patient demographics, with 79% of its 2.9 billion users active daily. Extending the reach of your website with likes and followers, you can create a mixture of posts and advertisements with photos, videos, slideshows and stories to diversify your feed and keep followers coming back for more. Facebook also provides businesses with an extensive Ads platform, allowing you to target posts by demographic, location, hobbies, life experiences and combinations of many metrics that allow you to market to various members of your patient base.

Pioneering image and video marketing, Instagram allows you to share your practice through high quality images, text and video. As one of over 200M+ Business accounts visited every day on Instagram, it is important that your content is eye-catching and gets aimless scrollers to stop on your posts. By categorizing your posts with searchable hashtags, and taking advantage of Facebook Ad integration, you can create advertisements that are seamlessly interjected into your follower’s feeds.

Second in engagement only to Google, YouTube captures 82% of all consumer internet traffic. A number that is rapidly rising, videos are dominating content marketing, so taking advantage of this platform allows you to upload longer format videos that can include office tours, videos explaining your services and much more. Just as Facebook and Instagram co-mingle with their advertising offerings, YouTube can integrate into your Google search results when you incorporate relevant keywords into your video descriptions.

Another important video-based social media site that can command around 100 minutes of usage per day, TikTok has been rapidly increasing in popularity, with over 138 million active users in the United States. These short-form videos, generally taken with a mobile device, can be used to engage current and potential patients with short, funny videos and other fun content that adds personality to your practice.

Whereas Instagram and TikTok capture a younger demographic, 63% of X users are between the ages of 35-65 years old. Perhaps most beneficial when attending events or hosting Q&A sessions, live-tweeting has become a part of our everyday vernacular. Heavily reliant on links and hashtags to expand the character limit defining the length of posts, X provides rapid access in real-time to bring information to your audience. 

While it’s tempting to be present on every social media platform, focusing on those that best reach your intended patient base is more effective. Quality over quantity should guide your social media strategy, ensuring your content is relevant and engaging. Remember, social media is about being social, so prioritize meaningful interactions to build a personable and approachable online presence.