With people spending more time on social media than ever before, social media presents a unique opportunity for optometrists. However, the difficulty with social media often isn’t starting, it’s maintaining.
It’s easy to post on your personal social media about what you did over the weekend or about your most recent trip. The challenge is creating consistent high-quality content for your practice over a long period.
To help you produce engaging content for your followers, we’ve listed 6 tips to help your practice’s social media!
Patient FAQs
Before booking an appointment, prospective patients will likely do some research on your practice. Similar to your website, your social media platforms are your opportunity to make a great first impression.
Answering patient FAQs is your chance to let your practice’s empathy shine!
If these are questions you’re answering every time patients visit your practice, why not share them with everyone? As well, patient FAQs make for great backup posts if you’re short on content to share.
Quick Tips
Users love to learn. Whether it is an interesting fact or statistic, free knowledge will never fail to excite users. What’s more, users love content they can take action on, such as tips.
Sharing these tips through your social channels is an easy and effective way to establish your practice’s knowledge. These tips may seem obvious or even mundane to you, but they’re likely not common knowledge.
These tips should be simple and easy to consume.
Consider addressing the following topics with your tips:
- Eye care (daily routine)
- Identifying eye disease
- Vision protection
Similar to the FAQs, quick tips show patients you’re interested in helping them beyond them being in your practice.
Staff Spotlights
Your practice’s social media platforms can largely be used to build your brand, but they’re also building trust with patients. While sharing achievements like awards are great, it will never match the connection created by seeing the people behind the practice.
When attempting to make your practice stand out from all the noise on social media, your people are the only thing that truly makes you unique.
Your practice has likely spent time investing in constructing the perfect team to serve your patients. Don’t miss out on the opportunity of sharing your team through social media.
Staff spotlights can be both casual or professional. The key is to ensure they’re authentic and accurately represent your team.
Be proud of your team and have fun sharing them with your followers!
Success Stories
Continuing with sharing what’s behind your practice, success stories are our next tip.
No one knows your practice better than you. You’ve seen hard times, solved problems, and made it out on top. Don’t waste these stories.
Sharing the stories behind your practice is one of the best ways to be authentic with users. When sharing success stories, don’t hide anything. Don’t be afraid to share difficulties or hard times. These are what bring a story to life!
A great success story is an opportunity to share your practice’s passion. If patients see that you’re in the problem-solving business, they’re much more likely to trust your practice.
Use Hashtags
If you’ve been active on social media, you’ve likely seen hashtags included on posts. Hashtags are hidden gems that sadly, often get overlooked.
Although your practice may be using hashtags, are you taking advantage of their full potential? Hashtags are your opportunity to tap into your target audience. With this, it is important to select hashtags that are relevant to your post’s audience (avoid simply describing what is in the post).
Using proper hashtags is one of the best ways to properly focus your post. This is an opportunity to reach new users (potentially leading to new patients).
When using hashtags, don’t be afraid to experiment. Take time to learn what hashtags are performing and what others in the industry are using.
Ask Questions
In the world of social media, you’ve probably heard others talk about a post’s “engagement”. Engagement is a term often used to describe a post’s performance. Commonly, this refers to the number of likes or comments you receive. However, engagement has the opportunity to be so much more.
Asking your audience questions is an excellent way to create higher user engagement. With a question, you’re allowing users to share their voices. When users have the chance to share their thoughts and opinions, they feel valued.
Beyond driving engagement, questions are a great way to find out what your audience actually thinks. This can help your practice from making false assumptions. As well, asking questions can help generate even more content for your practice.
Bring Your Social Media to Life
Your practice’s social media platforms can be a powerful tool. However, developing the right type of content for your audience can take time. Don’t feel discouraged through the process, keep experimenting.
All in all, social media is your opportunity to share what makes your practice special. Have fun sharing your practice with your audience!
Interested in learning more about how you can improve your social media? We’re always happy to help!
