How Healthcare Practices Can Capitalize on Facebook Opportunities

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How Healthcare Practices Can Capitalize on Facebook Opportunities Social media marketing, particularly Facebook marketing could provide the results that infinitely more expensive ad campaigns cannot provide. This is thanks to the amazing reach of social media and the popularity of Mark Zuckenberg’s pioneer social networking platform, Facebook. Partnering with a professional medical SEO provider that offers web promotion and social media optimization for healthcare facilities can provide your practice with the visibility it deserves.

Businesses extensively use Facebook for their marketing efforts and there’s no reason why medical practices shouldn’t capitalize on the opportunities that this platform offers. The truth is that healthcare practices do use Facebook, but in many cases, results are not as effective as they should be. Often, they use their personal accounts to promote their practice which is not quite the ideal method. This strategy could easily backfire.

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Separating Your Personal and Business Facebook Life You must keep your personal account and business account separate and distinct in Facebook. The two just do not go together.

To begin with, Facebook does not have a policy of allowing business accounts and personal accounts to be mixed. Facebook is against using personal profiles for promoting businesses and this is clearly mentioned in its Terms of Service. If you continually indulge in using your personal account for promotional reasons, you face the risk of your account getting cancelled, which brings more trouble.

Get Vital Analytics with Your Business Account Then, your personal account does not allow you to gauge the number of readers and their response to your posts.

That’s because the analytics feature which is available with Facebook business pages is not available for personal accounts. Analytics are crucial for measuring your marketing efforts, and they are enough of a convincing reason to carry out all promotional efforts for your healthcare practice with your business account so you don’t waste time, money and resources.

You also cannot overlook the advertising opportunities Facebook provides. It offers opportunities for inexpensive and targeted advertising, and you could deal with every kind of patient which your practice targets. You need to

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have a business page and really use it to exploit the advertising opportunities it provides.

More Fans and No More Bugged Personal Friends With a personal account, the number of friends you can make is limited to 5000. Clearly, you’d want more than 5,000 people to be keep in touch with your account if business promotion is your goal. But with a business account you can have an unlimited number of fans who can see and give “Like” to your posts.

Then, the obvious danger of using your personal accounts for promotional purposes is that your personal contacts could get really annoyed by your marketing messages. It could really turn them off.

Integrating Various Social Media Strategies A good Facebook marketing strategy must complement the other promotional steps you take such as maintaining a professional medical website as well as interesting and regularly updated blogs. Social media strategies should involve not only Facebook but also Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other networks. It is necessary to make at least 10 posts each week on Google+ and Facebook while it should be around 40 tweets per week for Twitter. But make sure you don’t get involved in too much self-promotion.

Beyond the online activities, your healthcare practice should have some community activity. You should ensure that your clinic has a presence at community gatherings,

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festivals, health fairs, etc. It is also vital that you position yourself as the expert when it comes to medical discussions in local publications and news channels. This can provide amazing promotional reach for your practice among your targeted audience within the community and geographic region, while your online and Facebook efforts would help in reaching out to a wider audience.