For busy veterinary practices, it can be a struggle to keep up-to-date on your social media. Creating new posts, responding to potential patients, and engaging with your current clients requires a lot of work, but here are some tips to save your staff time and energy!
Update All Your Practice Contact Info
As your posts gather more engagement, new visitors will come to your page to learn more about your practice. Ensure that your contact information, location, and hours are fully correct so they can schedule an appointment. Your practice should set up a quarterly check to confirm your contact info on Facebook, Yelp, Google My Business, and other sites.
Post Frequently
Taking the time to come up with new posts can be a challenge for busy veterinary practices, but it’s essential to growing your audience and attracting new leads. To maximize the impact of social media, you want to be posting at least three times a week. Many practice owners sit down at the start of every month and compose pet care tips, tricks, and fun posts for the entire month. Your team can then share these posts when they have time, crossing them off as they go. If this seems like too much work, you may want to invest in a veterinary marketing team like ProSites who can create both content and images to post for your practice a few times a week.
Create a Visual Story
One of the most important pieces of your social media presence is your images. People scroll quickly through content, so you have less than a second to catch their attention. Whenever you launch a post, ensure that it’s accompanied by a compelling image. Your team can use sites like Canva.com to create scroll-stopping images, or partner with a company like ProSites who can handle the creative for you.
In addition to including images on your post, you also want to make a statement with your Facebook cover photo. Use a picture of your practice’s front desk, a group photo of your staff, or something that tells your unique story. Above all, you just want to make a connection with new visitors and inspire them to follow your page!
Set Up an Autoresponder for Private Messages
Responding to private messages can be a challenge for a busy practice, but you don’t want to leave your visitors hanging. While it’s best to respond directly through Facebook whenever possible, you may want to direct potential patients to call or email instead. Here’s a good example of a Facebook autoresponder: “Thanks so much for your message! We’re currently working with our patients to ensure every pet receives excellent care. If you’d like to schedule an appointment, please call us at [phone number] or visit our website at [URL]!” This gives your potential patients a more traditional way to contact your practice and prevents them from being left unanswered for long periods of time.
Encourage Your Patients to Follow You
In addition to bringing in new appointments, social media is an excellent tool for building the relationships you already have. Since you likely see your pet parents a few times a year at most, you can build up their loyalty by showcasing how much you care for your patients. Frequent social media posts with pet care tips will help you build client loyalty, which leads to future referrals and extra appointments! Don’t forget to ask them to “Follow” and “Like” you.
Conclusion
It can be difficult to run your social media page while running your practice, but these tips will help you make the most of your efforts! By building a social channel that both attracts new leads and delights your existing clients, you can help steadily grow your practice. For more social media marketing tips check out some of our other blog posts, or contact us today to speak to a social media expert.
