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Social media has become a vital part of today’s digital marketing efforts across all sectors of business. Without a social media strategy, marketers are missing a key opportunity to reach their target audience where the audience is already at. Learning how to utilize social media platforms to highlight the strengths of your practice has become a powerful tool in today’s medical marketing landscape. A good social media strategy can greatly improve a practice’s credibility and trust among patients as well as positively impact lead generation and patient engagement.
However, beginning to implement social media as part of one’s marketing efforts can be a challenge. Understanding what types of content will appeal most to users on each platform and which platform is right for a business is a daunting task. Taking the time to understand the differences between platforms and where your practice is best suited can be the difference in seeing results. Each platform has different demographics, content focuses, and specialties which can help you decide which one to focus your resources on.
The first and most widely used social media platform across all demographics is Facebook. As a result, Facebook should be at the top of any marketing campaign for physicians and medical professionals. The platform has over 1.3 billion users, and the age average is 25-54, which is the prime audience for those seeking reliable medical care. In addition, 60% of Facebook’s audience is female. Furthermore, Facebook can be the ideal place to start your social media marketing efforts because the platform has special features that can help you target and track ideal audiences for your business.
For medical practices, Facebook accounts are one of the first things that search engines pick up, as Facebook profiles will frequently appear at the top of Google’s site rankings for local searches.
Facebook also hosts services that allow for powerful customized targeting because of the platform’s hosted user data. This allows you to target exact geographic locations, age, interests, income levels, etc. in organic or paid posts. Such targeting ensures that your message is delivered to the exact audience that you are trying to attract. The universality of Facebook for marketing features makes it a great fit for all types of medical practices.
However, there is a small catch! Initially a lot of your engagement metrics can be limited as you need to build up your likes and interactions before you can use a lot of the features on Facebook. As such, this platform is a long-term investment. The company also has moved a lot of its features to the paid Meta Ads Manager since the company went public, meaning it has become much more of a pay-to-play sort of system. This monetization doesn’t mean you can’t use it or that it can’t help you; it simply requires your practice to make a budget for any potential Facebook Ad spend.
Instagram is the extremely fast growing “little brother” to Facebook that instead relies heavily on video and image content. It has around 800 million active users, and 80% of users follow a business. However, its age demographic is skewed towards the younger side, with 60% of users under the age of 30. Instagram marketing for practices should thus focus on engagement with patients through images or videos of the practice or procedures and results.
Because of this emphasis on visuals, Instagram tends to be a better fit for surgeons and dentists or practices that have much more to show in a visual format. However, if you use it correctly to highlight your practice, Instagram can still be extremely effective. Instagram is particularly adept in generating leads, targeting local patients, and highlighting any medical practice events.
One potential downside of this visual format is that it can become very time-intensive in regards to content creation. Instagram involves the constant creation of custom graphics, interaction with followers, posting, advertising, and search and hashtag optimization. However, the diligent and patient practice will see powerful results with time, but this becomes a question of cost-benefit.
The social media platform formerly known as Twitter (now X) can be a fascinating way to share original content if used correctly. X has about 600 million users with mostly a young demographic ranging from the ages of 18-29. X, being a short text based social media platform, is designed to share conversations, news articles, and information quickly and can help your practice’s search results. Hashtags also originated with X and can be used to help users and doctors find content related to their search. Hashtags can also help practices share content quickly.
The advantage of X is that if it is used diligently and consistently – similarly to Instagram – it will yield positive results for your practice. Additionally, X can be more accessible because you can create a large amount of content without the need for video marketing. However, the tweet or message is unfortunately limited to a specific word count. Additionally, tweets have a short shelf life with over 6,000 tweets being sent out every minute. This requires almost constant posting in order for your practice to be seen.
One of the highest trending social media platforms, LinkedIn provides a digital networking platform for its users. LinkedIn has been growing in popularity among healthcare professionals. The platform hosts about 600 million users with most of them being well-established professionals between the ages of 30-49. The majority of LinkedIn traffic is mobile, with it being a significantly newer platform. 71.5% of users live outside of the U.S., showcasing the platform’s strengths as a global networking service.
LinkedIn’s main purpose is to serve as a business development and networking service, but it also has a secondary function as a job board for employers seeking new hires. In terms of how LinkedIn can assist practices in their digital marketing efforts, like Facebook it has a posting feature that allows you to share news and information with your entire “network”. This can lead to the building of relationships with potential clients and other medical professionals when done correctly.
The only drawback to the service is that LinkedIn is a highly personal service and involves more of the individual physician than a practice as a whole. It’s not impossible, but it is much more difficult, to build brand relationships on LinkedIn as opposed to relationships with a specific client or physician. That said, all types of physicians can find success on the platform.
Arguably the most effective platform for medical practices, YouTube allows physicians to record long form and short form original content or medical procedures. This can serve as a significant way for patients to get information directly from their physician and can build high levels of brand trust among patients. The platform has 1 billion users and the average time one spends watching videos on YouTube has gone up 60% year over year. YouTube is the largest search engine next to Google.
Given that YouTube is a powerful way to reach an innumerable number of patients with informative and helpful medical information, this platform can vastly increase traffic to your websites and offices. One could argue as well that it’s significantly easier for a doctor to record a quick video for patients than invest time in blog-writing or social media post planning. YouTube also is a tool that is effective for all types of doctors and practices across the medical field due to its ability to reach such a large number of people.
However, the only roadblock that exists when dealing with YouTube is monetary. Creating any form of video content with the level of quality required for YouTube is extremely resource intensive. Going into production with a YouTube well-allocated budget, however, can alleviate these concerns and help you allocate resources more effectively.
Pinterest is a social media platform that is centered around sharing ideas or images with “pins” in groups called “boards”. This platform is overwhelmingly female-focused with 81% of all users being female and mostly from the millennial generation. Large portions of Pinterest users say that the app informs their buying habits, with 87% of users stating is usefulness for product recommendations and 72% of users stating it informs their buying decisions offline.
Naturally, the platform is designed as a virtual cork board that’s centered around “how to guides”. Pinterest for businesses and medical practices is designed to primarily increase click through rates to websites and subtly advertise through pinned health guides, which users can re-pin and share again. Therefore, Pinterest serves best as a platform for lead generation, since most users of the platform are looking for information that they can save to their boards and use again later.
This self-focused attitude on Pinterest also has some downsides. The content must be of a significant quality for the users to want to re-pin it or save it to their boards. Since the user base is primarily female, medical care or information looking to target women will do much better.
Each of these platforms has significant strengths and weaknesses, but the key to deciding which one is best for you is which audience you want to reach, and how much you are willing to invest. Once you identify the platform that aligns with your practice’s needs, you can then develop a consistent strategy of posting and content creation.
If you are looking to grow your presence on social media and have hit a roadblock in your strategy, contact MedShark Digital and let us take care of your digital marketing needs so you don’t have to.