Time. You haven’t got enough of it, have you? If you’re not busy treating, you’re busy with family commitments and fitting in some sport and exercise. And if you’re not doing all that, you’re battling with accounts, paying bills and generally keeping everything going.
Phew! And then I have the audacity to keep on urging you to constantly post stuff on social media? I must be having a laugh…
But what if there is time really?
What if it’s just a case of prioritising.
And what if you just need to know how to be a tad nifty in your planning too…
What is social media in relation to business?
Social media is a FREE and really easy way to get in front of prospective patients. So let’s check out some stats:
There are 1.44 billion active Facebook users per month (13% higher than 2014)
936 million people consistently log in to Facebook on a daily basis!
4.75 billion pieces of content are posted daily.
So just in case you thought Facebook was a nightmare; it might just be your new best friend because there is a promising audience right there and available to you!
Twitter – 500 million tweets per day.
The life of a tweet is only 24 minutes before it disappears into the abyss…
So now you can see how a couple of tweets per week is just a drop in the ocean and it’s highly unlikely that many people saw them. This is the super highway of social media and one where it’s almost impossible to post too much! Just don’t dump them all there in one hit; spread the timings out over the day so that you get excellent reach.
YouTube
Can you believe that there are 7 hours worth of video uploaded every minute?!
The important thing to know about YouTube is that it is now owned by Google, the most powerful search engine in the world. So guess how many videos are pulled up when a search is made? Plenty!
So I always urge my Clients to record short videos explaining their passion for Osteopathy. Many of my Clients have demonstrated how to give great stretches to a horse, the difference between a good office chair and a bad one or how you can train your cat to give you high fives!
This is the fastest way of taking a prospective patient through the know, like, trust process and making it easy for them to take the first step and book to see you.
So what could you simply demonstrate?
There are 300 million personal profiles and 3 million businesses listed here.
This is where you will mainly find professionals; in fact I am connected to over 2,000 worldwide Osteopaths here and upwards of 3,000 across all my social media platforms. But this is only useful to you if you are wanting to attract local office workers, hospital staff etc.
It’s not a place to waste your time and energy if your audience is not here but elsewhere! However, it’s a great place to interact with your peers and share knowledge.
There’s two main things going on with social media:
Content
This is the posting of items which are hopefully of interest to your audience. Be careful not to be posting stuff which is purely of interest to you and your peers. It’s a common issue I regularly see.
Then there’s the possibility of responding to other people’s content and sharing that on to your own audience.
Driving traffic to YOUR website is the real point of content. Adding in links back to relevant pages on your own website is crucial to your marketing efforts. So if you are mostly sending traffic off to global news agencies to read their articles you are doing THEM a favour and not yourself. Have a think about that because it’s another mistake I see being made all the time and, to be honest, it drives me nuts!
Conversation
This is about generating and responding to other’s comments. So when you do get interaction, don’t just let it hang out there – respond as soon as you can or the moment of interest is lost.
Encourage comments by asking questions and post some ‘Did you know?’ items which will educate and inform your audience.
Social media for the time poor
Plan it!
Let’s take Facebook as an example.
Want to schedule a whole bunch of posts in one go? Well you can. You can strategically schedule posts to go out when your particular Perfect Patients are online. Let’s say you like to attract commuters and office workers. They are highly likely to be online during the rush hour, so between about 8-9am and again from 5-6.30pm. It’s also highly likely that they will be checking their social media at lunchtime too.
Here’s how you do it. Instead of clicking ‘Publish’ on your post, you click on the adjacent down arrow and then from the drop down box you select ‘Schedule’ and input the time and date you want.
Imagine how many posts you could get done during a half hour cancellation rather than getting lost down the internet sink hole!
Social media automation tools
The following three examples are ways in which you can upload many posts at once, leaving you free to do what you do best – treat your patients! I recently spent two weeks on a Portuguese beach and stayed offline. However, my social media presence didn’t suddenly stop or go quiet. Posts continued to appear across all my social media platforms and I even sold some products whilst I topped up my tan!
Hootsuite
This is a powerful application which combines content and conversation – but it’s noisy! It’s also reporting back to the desktop who has mentioned you or replied to your posts. So it’s a single place where you can monitor all the action. There are free and paid for options, depending on the size of your Practice but the free version covers up to three separate social media platforms.
Buffer
This is best used free and simply and cleanly deals with your content posting. This leaves you more time to interact with conversations on Facebook or Twitter as you go. It creates a content queue which enables you to physically post while you’re actually busy doing something else.
Ssshhhhh – my secret weapon – Cephalopod Edgar!
MeetEdgar has certainly made my life easier and here’s the main reason why:
Hootsuite and Buffer require you to constantly upload more content because as it posts them, they then disappear off the system. However, Edgar has a LIBRARY of content which you can keep adding to so that it constantly is INCREASING rather than DECREASING. Edgar recycles your content and reposts it because – remembering all those Tweets, Facebook posts etc most people will not have seen it the first time.
This costs in the region of £31 per month BUT the time saved and the huge amount of extra traffic you can send to your website and convert into bookings is phenominal.
Here’s a link to a two week free trial – which sadly they didn’t offer me but I’m passing on to you! (This is not an affiliate link)
Shrink your links!
This site bitly.com is a great tool for shrinking links down to size. Plus if you have signed up for an account it also integrates with MeetEdgar, giving you even more information about your most popular links.
For example these two links have identical destinations:
https://www.osteobiz.com/osteobiz-club/business-strategy-calls/
It also tracks the clicks on this too so you can observe which of your links is attracting attention.
How Social Media has grown my business
To date I have not advertised anywhere. All my marketing has been focused on social media and my weekly blog posts. So basically I spend almost nothing on my marketing! And I have grown a thriving business serving Osteopaths worldwide who want to easily attract more patients for little investment.
Now you know the secrets to easy social media marketing but if you would like more strategies specifically tailored to you, then drop me a line to find out the best way for me to help you.
