5 Social Media Tactics To Drive More Traffic To Your Healthcare Practice

With ever-increasing competition, hospitals, clinics, and pharmaceutical companies are focused on providing better service and faster responses using social media. Many people use social media to stay up to date on healthcare news and resources and the idea of following doctors on various social media platforms is becoming the norm. Social media is a cost effective marketing tool that helps healthcare professionals connect with potential patients. A reliable medical SEO service provider can help you optimize their social media profiles to build awareness, increase engagement rate and improve communication with your target audience.

According to an article by PharmaExec.com in 2020, 73 percent of oncologists reported using social media as a clinical information source, with 28 percent using Twitter and 45 percent using LinkedIn.

In addition, a study in PLoS One1 showed a 63 percent increase in page views for articles that were tweeted. Many pharmaceutical companies like Allergan, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Company, Merck, etc have social media accounts to facilitate scientific exchange.

5 Top Techniques That Can Drive More Traffic To Your Medical Practice Website Via Social Media: –

Healthcare and social media make an excellent combination to improve patient engagement and to educate potential patients with informative, accurate and relevant content. Here are 5 top techniques that can drive more traffic to your medical practice website via social media:

• • Give your Audience what they Want: Before posting any content on social media, it is vital to understand what your audience wants. Gather information from sources like medical science liaisons or surveys to enhance your understanding of educational needs and pain points. Understanding what your potential patient needs can help you identify whether social media is the right vehicle for driving traffic, and if so, which platform is best to meet your objectives. Healthcare professionals should realize different needs and pain points. You should also identify the ways they like to absorb content such as via short form multimedia summaries or long form content. The same content strategy may not work for all patients. So knowing your audience will help you create different types of content that will satisfy all your target audience.

    

• • Pick the Right Platform Once you know what your Audience Want, then next step is choosing the right social media platform. Each social media channel has a mission, purpose, and unique audience. For instance, Instagram is a purely visual platform, and its use is entirely mobile while Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are purely for networking. So if you have an Instagram account and are unable to tell story or post images to educate your audience, then it is not the right channel for you. If you have a strong brand voice and wish to lean into the exchange aspect of Medical Affairs, then Twitter is the best place. If your objective is simply to attract the best talent to your organization by sharing relevant data and innovative solutions, choose LinkedIn. So the key is to understand your objectives before choosing social media channels.

• • Optimize your Content for your Audience: After identifying the right channel for your objectives, audience and content, the next step is to optimize your content. There are different types of content that can posted on social media platforms and each type of content has different purposes, like better online visibility, asking a question, or initiating a deeper discussion, etc. Follow these steps to optimize your social media presence, and drive awareness and content consumption:

    Drive Awareness and Optimize Content:

    • Your presence on social media platforms should be regular and consistent. Posting content irregularly will not get you the attention you want and posting sporadically can even lead loss of confidence on your account, which will eventually lead to a fall in followers. Posting too frequently is also not good as it can be boring.
    • tag Choose the right time to post your content, depending on when you receive the most engagement.
    • Use hashtags on appropriate social media channels. This will increase the visibility of your content and more people will be able to see it.
    • Tag authors or other company handles for additional visibility on their network.
    • Write effective social media post copy. Posts should have catchy headlines that generate curiosity among people.
    • Choose the right keywords: Most people use search engine for queries. Study your audience’s search behaviour, and create content with frequently used keywords.
    • Share only your best content: Creating a good first impression online is important to get more clicks on your content. If someone has clicked on your content earlier and it did not meet their expectations, they will be less likely to click on it again.
    • Include persuasive words that will encourage clicks: Research and understand specific terminology that, when used within calls-to-action, will increase click-through rates.

• • Make sure that your content is visible: Once your content for social media is ready, the next step is to improve its online visibility. There are both organic and paid methods to boost the visibility of the post.

    Organic methods to increase visibility of your post include:

    • Use relevant hashtags that align with your content of interest including industry specific or conference hashtags.
    • Other company-owned assets like websites, e-signatures, virtual booths etc. should link to your social media.
    • Share content from the Medical Affairs handle on corporate social media channels.
    • Make use of key opinion leaders and digital opinion leaders to help assist with channel engagement by finding out influencers to follow, identifying a range of messages or content types that may be relevant, creating digital profiles of high-priority influencers etc.

      
      Source: twitter.com/cityofhope

    Paid Methods:

    • Targeting: Twitter lets you develop customized audience lists that can be extended to similar audiences based on their activity on this platform. With LinkedIn, you can target relevant groups based on their profile descriptions.
    • Ads: Twitter favors using quizzes and polls to improve engagement, promote organic posting, and grow your follower base.

• Measurement and Adjustment: A social media marketing strategy is complete only if you include identification and selection of metrics that allow you to measure progress toward your goals and objectives. For success with your medical social media campaign, you should aim to improve the visibility of your content, align your content should with your values and how audiences want to receive the information, and finally, engaging in meaningful scientific dialogue.The dialogue rate can be measured by dividing the number of replies by the number of posts. Engaging in a meaningful dialogue requires a deep understanding of your audience and what they value. Dialogue rate helps to measure the conversation and provides insights on whether you are meeting their needs.

Social media can help raise awareness among the public about new and emerging health issues. It can be also used to direct followers to credible sources of information. Posting relevant content regularly will help educate your audience and drive traffic to your website. A reliable medical SEO service provider can help optimize your content and post content regularly on the right social media channels to improve the visibility of your website and attract targeted traffic.