We are going to talk about “why we use social media?” and how you can use social media to help your practice.

It’s important to know where your audience lies in social media. You have to target your readers and not just potential patients. Appealing to a larger audience with a general interest in your specialty whether it’s plastic surgery or dermatology or other aspects of aesthetic medicine will help you a lot. Before you establish a social media platform, you have to establish certain goals. This goal can be patient education, public health promotion, dispel misinformation, brand identify, or even practice marketing. When you are posting on social media your most common post should be through direct engagement or two-way communication. Within our specialties, all of us have different strengths and weaknesses and social media is an opportunity to highlight what you do best so highlighting your specific procedures, unique devices/technologies, and breadth of experience is what you need to do. Because patients buy from people, not practices or organizations there is only one message and it is that you should interact with your patients as personally as possible. This can be time-consuming but try not to rely only on a marketing agency and take control of social media platforms and post and comment personally. You should use social media to communicate with your existing and also future patients.

We present you a step by step strategy to use social media and improve your practice:

1. Be an expert
2. Choose social media platform(s)
3. Create
4. Be consistent and constant
5. Interact with other professionals
6. Build your community
7. Promote yourself
8. Provide value

Visuals are extremely important on social media so incorporating an image or a short video clip is almost crucial to every single post that you have on social media. It is important to stay consistent in your visual and aesthetics on social media and that means using the same type of design philosophy, typography, fonts, etc. a third-party marketing agency can easily standardize this for you across your posts and platforms. It is crucial to not underestimate patient privacy on social media. As visual specialists, we need to show before and after photos and it’s critical to not only showing our realistic results but in marketing patients always want to see before and after photos on Instagram or web pages. Hear to the privacy laws in your country for example in some parts of Europe patient photos are no longer being shared at all.

You won’t get much patient contact on social media if you don’t have a lot of followers. Everybody starts from zero and getting followers is not easy but it must be done organically. There are some ways to cheat, you can buy followers, you can automate your posts, or manage your community with third-party applications.