Wondering how to create social media marketing for medical practices? If you are an Operations or Marketing Manager for a medical practice who is wondering how to safely create consistent and engaging medical social media marketing content, you are not alone. Our experience working with several medical practices in Colorado over the years has given us quite a few tips and tricks for garnering high engagement rates while maintaining patient confidentiality.
Here are 5 tips to create engaging social media marketing for medical practices while respecting patient confidentiality:
1. Highlight Your Medical Providers
If your patients keep coming back for medical advice and care, chances are they have a favorite provider. We find that when we highlight each individual provider with information about their educational background, credentials, and personal life, we consistently see high engagement rates.
Our provider posts often see the highest engagement out of all of our posts each month. For example, a recent post highlighting Dr. Thoman Anderson at Orthopaedic & Spine Center of the Rockies reached 1,880 people with 282 engagements.
We stand by the fact that people love hearing about and seeing other people, especially in the medical field when it comes to hearing about the doctors, nurses, and other practitioners who work so hard to care for their health.
2. Ask Your Patients for Testimonials
Asking your patients for testimonials is not only a good practice to build content for social media, but it is also a great way to build your company’s authority. When past or current patients review your staff and practices in a positive manner, new patients will notice when doing their online research.
Plus, positive Google reviews contribute to your search engine optimization and might even boost your Google ranking over time.
To incorporate testimonials into your medical social media marketing strategy, use portions of quotes on company-branded designs along with a thankful caption. Similarly, you can also use the entire quote in your post copy and pair it with a picture of one of your providers with a “patient.” We use the word patient in quotes here because due to patient confidentiality, it is often not advised to capture pictures of patients to use for social media purposes (or any other marketing purposes). We recommend staging pictures with your staff or non-patient friends/family to use for your social media marketing images.
Our next section talks about how to highlight your patients with patient consent.
3. Highlight Your Patients (With Permission)
This might seem confusing – in the last section, we advised against posting pictures of your patients with your providers due to HIPPA. While that is true and patient confidentiality must be respected, there are some strategic ways to highlight the people you care for.
For example, we work with The Youth Clinic, a pediatrician practice with multiple locations in Northern Colorado. To highlight their adorable patients (with explicit parental permission) we run an annual campaign called “Kids Spotlight” where we ask parents to submit pictures and a little information about each of their children. Upon submitting their entries, each parent agrees to allow us to publish information about and a picture of their child on our social media platforms.
Our Kids Spotlight posts receive the second-highest amount of engagement behind our provider highlight posts. We highly encourage all healthcare providers to highlight patients like The Youth Clinic highlights their little ones each month!
4. Ask Real Questions
Questions are by far one of the most common and successful ways to engage with your audience on social media. Whether you are asking questions via social media posts or asking with polls on your social media stories, there are various ways to engage with your audience through questions.
Do you work for a pediatricians office? Talk about fun recipes to cook in the kitchen with kids. Then, ask your audience what their favorite family-friendly recipes are.
How about hospitals? Tug at your patient’s heartstrings by asking them which nurse was by their side when they went through a difficult medical procedure. Tie that post in with National Nurses Day, which is happening on May 12, 2021.
There are so many ways to incorporate questions into your medical social media marketing strategy, but we urge you to think about what is most important to your patients when brainstorming questions to ask.
5. Talk About Recent Health Research
When medical professionals raise awareness for new research or discoveries about hot-topic health concerns, people want to hear about it – especially if it directly relates to your practice and/or the ailments you treat.
Exposing your audience to real-life solutions to their problems is one of those factors that pull on their heartstrings. If your medical practice shares content about a new treatment that the FDA approved that will help alleviate sciatica issues without surgery, that is a sign to your patients that your doctors are keeping up with the latest medical information and will be able to use that new information to solve their health issues.
We find the best way to accomplish this is to subscribe to your favorite medical industry website’s newsletter to find out the latest in health research. Or, ask your providers to forward information they find in their monthly research so that you can share it with your social media audience.
Creating engaging medical social media marketing posts into your strategy does not have to be difficult. We hope these 5 tips will help increase your medical practice’s engagement and awareness over time.
If you don’t have a content strategy or need help with your current strategy, contact OTM today to learn how we can help!