Best Practice
What can a doctor offer you?
A doctor can offer life-saving advice, medicine, incredible knowledge from their field, and much more. But how can a doctor appeal to you on social media?
This is a hard question to answer as many people prefer to not go to the doctor, hate the sight of blood, and would never even consider following a doctor’s account. However, there is a vast majority of users who are intrigued by medicine, surgeries, and medical knowledge who will follow a doctor on social media. This is who I have to target…
For my personal interest project, I run a doctor’s account that specializes in Urogynecology or women’s reconstructive surgery. This is not the most trending field to follow on social media, so targeting the right audience is the key to this Instagram account’s success.
KHOROS presents the top ‘ten social media best practices for 2020’:
The first practice is researching your customers. KHOROS states, “When we truly know more about the wants, needs, and expectations of customers — and can anticipate them in real-time — we can change the very nature of customer service and fundamentally reshape how customers view our brand”. This is one practice I use often as most of our followers are local to Mississippi and the doctors have a relationship with. However, I frequently use Instagram analytics to see which cities, states, and gender are seeing our posts and engaging the most.
Secondly, conducting a competitor audit is helpful. By doing this, it allows your company to see what competitors are doing better than you, what platforms they are on, and what you can do to surpass them. I often take a look at other Urogynecology accounts to see what hashtags, locations, and images they’re using. This helps me evaluate my account and see what I am doing well and where I’m slacking. It is also super important to know who your competitors are and what platforms they are posting to.
The next important step is to establish and maintain your brand’s voice. This step is crucial because the way a brand talks to its followers is important and this goes hand in hand with customer service. For my account, even though it’s a doctor’s office, we try to keep it friendly and light-hearted. That friendly voice is key for us because we are trying to attract women of all ages and we want to be as inviting as possible. Like I said before, many people hate going to the doctor, so it is crucial to be as transparent and exciting as possible on social.
Choosing the right time and amount to post has a significant impact on your account. Sometimes, if accounts are posting way too much, people tend to unfollow them. This is the same for accounts who never post. Being consistent is key as is posting good content. For Southeast Urogyn, we post to the story every day and aim to post 4–6 times a week. This is what works for our account and we have tried different times and days to see what works the best for us.
It is so so important to know the best times to post for your account. I can not stress this enough. For Southeast Urogyn, we use the Instagram insights from our business account to see the best times to post for our account. This allows us to see what age and gender our primary audience is and what times they are most active on which days. This shows me if we are hitting our target audience; women. I try to refer to this when posting, but most days I aim for the afternoon as this is when our target audience seems to engage the most. However, knowing when our audience is on Instagram the most is very important for our engagement. For us, it is the difference between 8 and 55 likes. More people see our stuff in the afternoon and nighttime. The more we plan to post when our audience is online, the more engagement and people we reach. This is key.
However, later says setting up the best posting times all depends on your account. Although there are suggested best times, trial and error is the best way to start with an account. From there, a more established calendar can be created with specific times after analyzing how these trail times are performed. Since Southeast Urogyn uses the Instagram business tool, buffer shows that “If you have a business profile on Instagram, you will have data similar to your Facebook Insights in your Instagram Insights. Look for the Audience section in your Instagram Insights to see the days and hours when your followers are most active’.
Social media listening tools and other tools are great for keeping track of analytics on your account. These tools can be used to schedule content and organize messages and audience into categories for your brand. Although I do not use any tools besides my Instagram business account, there are many beneficial tools such as hoot suite and google analytics. These tools help keep an account organized and on track for success.
Customer service is a must when it comes to social media. Responding to messages and comments is easy and customers appreciate this response. According to KHOROS, “over 40% of customers who reach out to brands on social media are more likely to buy and encourage their friends and families to buy from companies who provide them with a timely response”. So, responses are needed as they are more likely to make sales.
KHOROS also says using your team as a resource is good because different team members are experts in different areas. For me, I am the only social media team member, so I have to be at the top of my game at all times. If I do not know an answer, I refer to the experts, the doctors.
The next step is to share customer feedback, especially when it is positive. For Southeast Urogyn, we are sharing customer reviews weekly. If a new, good review comes in, we usually share it. However, if a bad review or message comes in, we either message them personally or address it right then.
For example, last week, we posted a picture of the doctors and their team in surgery. In the post, you could see the patient’s legs from her feet to her knee. She was unidentifiable and every patient signs a consent form before surgery, if they please so that pictures like such can be used. We posted this picture captioning it “Great day in the OR- finished 12 cases in less than 2 hours”. On Facebook, we received a comment from a woman saying, “I know surgery is exciting, but I wouldn’t be happy if I were that woman”. Since we are a doctor’s office, we chose to not respond to this comment. For one, the woman is covered and no one would be able to identify her as her face and body are covered. Secondly, we are a doctor’s office and can not disclose information on Facebook. And lastly, she signed an agreement letting us use this photo. So, this step should be acknowledged more because not only is it beneficial to share the good reviews, but acknowledge the bad. It is also imperative to use your best judgment when it comes to these sorts of comments. A brand should never ‘fight’ a customer on their negative reviews, but rather guide them to the right answer when applicable.
The ninth step is building a relationship with your customers. For us, this is huge as doctors must have a good relationship with their patients so that our clinic gets good reviews and referrals. We all hear stories of ‘bad’ doctors and people will easily write a bad review with one bad experience. Not only must our clinic provide a good experience to patients visiting, but providing a warm and inviting social presence so that patients are more inclined to visit the office. When we receive messages or comments, we always respond promptly and with the best advice we can without disclosing too much information. Building these relationships has a direct benefit to your brand’s socials, too. If customers like your product and customer service, they will like and engage with your posts, no matter when they see it.
Lastly, social media marketing tools are handy especially when it comes to optimizing campaign results. It is hard to analyze data on your own and often the Instagram business feature does not give you detailed analytics and can be confusing to maneuver, so using an outside tool such as Facebook’s Creator Studio is awesome for a one-woman team like me. Although I have the Southeast Urogyn set up as an Instagram business, at times, the insights can be hard to find and track on the actual app. So, Facebook’s Creator Studio provides a clearer, more concise option to view insights for both our Facebook and Instagram pages. Facebook Creator Studio allows me to access the insights to Instagram on a desktop. Opening the insights on a desktop is beneficial for me as I can see on a larger screen and scale the insights, activity, and audience. Not only do I love accessing it on a desktop, but it is easier to navigate on this tool. The tool does the work for me and saves me time, especially being a team of one. The activity part shows me when most of my followers are active, and I try to post around these times on certain days.
Overall, it takes more than posting a picture to a social media channel to attract followers and engagement. There is much more to running a brand’s social media channels. One channel at a time needs its own careful and thought-out breakdown and plan as all platforms vary. For example, curating a list of hashtags for Instagram is a necessity because Instagram runs off hashtags, while these would not be helpful for Facebook because Facebook does not use hashtags. That being said, having a tool like google analytics that tracks all of your channel’s success is necessary in order to see progress on your channels and save time.
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