Social media is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing for most businesses and dermatology practices can make use of it too, to engage with and attract local customers.
There are advantages to using social media to market your dermatology practice, but also some challenges to be aware of, so read on for our social media tips for dermatologists!
What is social media marketing and why does it matter?
Given the number of people now using social media, it’s a safe bet that most of us know what it is and that it can be used to market businesses. Here is Gartner’s definition of social media marketing, which we think is pretty comprehensive:
“Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with audiences to build the company’s brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. This involves paid, owned, and earned media efforts, including publishing great content on social media profiles, listening to and engaging with followers, analyzing results, and running social media advertisements.”
According to SmartInsights, “57.6% of the world’s population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes (October 2021)” so it’s fair to say that if you’re not on social media and reaching out to potential patients, you really are missing out.
As more and more people use social media, it is expected that the companies they are interested in will be active on social media and will interact with them in a variety of ways, including with comments, direct messages, and mentions.
Basically, if you’re not on social media, you can pretty much guarantee that your competition is. And why let them have all the fun?
Good social media marketing is about more than just liking posts and pages and sharing cat videos. It really can make all the difference to your reputation and your bottom line.
A solid social media marketing plan for local dermatology practices can:
- Build trust, build your brand, and grow your practice’s reputation online.
- Encourage word-of-mouth, referrals, and reviews
- Build traffic back to your website
- Increase your conversion rates
- Encourage connections and deeper relationships with your patients
- Boost your SEO efforts
- And, of course, add to your bottom line.
Social media is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but an essential part of marketing your dermatology practice.
Social media and HIPAA
Social media marketing can bring many benefits to your practice but, of course, you do have to consider HIPAA and protected health information (PHI) when posting anything online, even if you’ve posted it in a private message.
While your patients are entitled to post whatever they like online about their own health and medical information, you can’t do the same or even confirm that they are, or were, a patient of yours.
There are opportunities on social media to share case studies, personal client stories, and before and after shots, but take HIPAA into account at every stage. Ensure you ask the patient’s permission to post and don’t reveal anything they don’t want you to.
With reviews, it’s easy to get carried away when responding to a positive comment and to reveal more than you intended. Equally, with negative reviews, it’s tempting to want to defend yourself and to clap back, but again, keep HIPAA front of mind when responding and offer to take the conversation offline and in private so that you can resolve the issue without revealing PHI in public.
Even with the challenge of HIPAA, it is still possible to create a social media marketing plan that presents your practice in the best light and attracts potential clients.
Overview of a successful social media strategy
Start by setting goals
As with any type of marketing, you’ll get far more out of it if you know what you want to achieve. Before you begin setting out your social media strategy, review where you currently are with your social media marketing. Look at how many followers you have and where your potential clients hang out. Check your stats and see how much engagement you’re getting.
Once you know how your social media marketing is currently working, you can then set some goals for what you want to achieve. These goals will be individual for each practice, but you may want to set goals for the number of reviews per month, new patients, community outreach, traffic, conversion rates, and other metrics that help you measure success.
Ensure you know your target market
Even if you’ve already done buyer personas and looked at your patient demographics, it’s worth reviewing this regularly to make sure nothing has changed. Obviously, you’ll have better success targeting people if you know who they are and what they want, so this extra step is worth it.
Platforms
Unless you have an open calendar and unlimited time, it’s impossible to be on every social media platform and do it well. It’s better to look at where your ideal patients are most active and choose a primary platform to focus on, with one or two secondary platforms. If you take on more than that, you’ll split your focus and find you’re spending more time doing your social media than you do treating patients.
Messaging
Think about how you can build your brand on social media. You need to be consistent across all platforms with your company name, colors, fonts, banners, and bios. Potential patients need to be able to look at your page on any platform and instantly recognize that it’s the same company, whether you’re on Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform.
Messaging is just as important as the visual part of branding. Be consistent with your brand voice, the language you use, how you present your company, whether you use humor or not, and with what you say across all platforms.
The idea is for this to build over time and create not only your best first impression, but your best impression everywhere people look online.
Content
Think about what you will post on social media. With care and reference to HIPAA, you can post case studies, before and after studies, accurate educational resources to dispel myths and build trust, and so much more. As with any type of marketing, it’s about giving your audience what they want to see.
Engagement
If you’ve reviewed your current engagement when setting your goals, you’ll already have a good idea of how responsive you are and whether the style and tone of your content engages people or is ignored.
If you’re not getting good results here, then up your game and start replying to people who interact with your page, whether with positive or negative comments. This builds trust and lets people see that you’re a real person who genuinely wants to help.
If no one’s commenting or liking your posts, then it’s time to go back to the beginning and look at your whole approach, including your target audience, to find out why people aren’t responding to you and what you can do to fix it.
Tips on how to create effective social media content
Content ideas
For dermatologists, while you must keep HIPAA in mind, here are some ideas on what sort of content to create:
1) General education / informative content
We know there is so much fake or incorrect medical information on the internet, whether it’s anti-vaccine myths or terrible advice on treating conditions by people who aren’t medical experts. The great thing is that you are an expert on dermatology, so why not write a series of myth-busting articles, skincare advice articles, and other expert educational and informational articles that can genuinely help people?
Not only can you do some good in drowning out the ‘fake news’, but you can also help potential clients, establish your authority in your field, and build trust.
Then, when people are looking for a dermatologist, they’re far more likely to choose you.
2) Questions & Answers
Questions and answers are a great way to provide expert medical information and to reassure potential patients about when to expect when they visit your practice. You can start off by thinking of questions that you think your audience is likely to ask, but when you begin to get real questions from potential patients, answering them makes them feel heard. They feel that you are taking them seriously and that you care, and that is one step closer to getting them to book an appointment with you.
3) Brand updates
People love to see the real human beings behind a business and you can share updates on new employees starting or employee promotions. You can talk about a day in the life of a dermatologist at your practice, and mention any community work you’re doing, such as sponsoring the local baseball team or getting involved in charity work. You could post about new procedures you’re offering, upgrades to the latest equipment, redecorating the practice, and so much more.
Doing so gives you a lot of content to post and gives a great impression of a genuine, caring practice.
4) Humorous memes and gifs
You do need to be careful here, as humor may not be appropriate for your practice and because even mild humor may not hit right with potential clients, but if it fits in with your brand and the way you want to be perceived, humor can lighten your feed, attract engagement, and help you connect more with your ideal clients.
5) User generated content
While your own content is great, potential clients pay far more attention to what people say about you and your practice than what you say about yourself.
Encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews on review sites, including on social media. Positive reviews and recommendations are really powerful in encouraging others to try your practice.
Other types of user-generated content include comments in reply to you and posts about you on their own social media.
While not everything may be positive, even negative reviews can be turned to your advantage, as if you can be seen to deal with them well on social media, this can build trust with your audience.
Tips for creating content
1) Know your audience
Yes, we’re back to this again. But it’s true! The more you know your audience, the more you’ll know what content they want to see and what format they prefer. What sort of content do they like? Would they rather see posts from you or would they rather watch a video or a Facebook Live? Find out and you’ll never run out of things to say.
2) Tone of voice and language
You are a highly qualified and experienced professional, but chances are your patients don’t know all the technical terms in dermatology, so keep it simple and don’t overdo the jargon.
Talk to your patients online in the same way you talk to them when they come to your practice. Not only does that help with being consistent, but you’ll sound more human and approachable.
When you get engagement and questions from your patients, look at how they speak and the words they use. Try to use the same type of language as they do in your posts and replies. It builds trust and connection.
3) Look at what your competitors are doing
We’re not at all saying you should copy your competitors, but it’s worth looking at their blog and social media for ideas on what to post and to pick up on what keywords and phrases they’re using for SEO.
So, now you’ve read our social media tips for dermatologists and hopefully got the beginnings of a plan for your social media, why not attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo?
There’s a lot to do when it comes to marketing your business, but with Surefire’s all-in-one local marketing software, you can run all your digital marketing, including your social media—but so much more too—all from one place.
Take back control of your marketing, including leads, reviews, ads, content, email, directories, social media, photos, and more. Stop relying on duct-tape solutions that lead to frustrating results and eliminate data silos from your organization to gain a 360-degree perspective on ROI.
Get a single sign-on view of literally everything you need to know with a data-driven marketing intelligence platform that seamlessly aligns your branding and messaging to online and offline touchpoints as people move through the customer journey.
With Surefire, you can concentrate on running your dermatology business and still knock your social media marketing out of the park!