Not every healthcare professional is cut out to win at the social media game. It takes a specific skill set to excel in digital. Some traits that come to mind are creativity, personality, ingenuity, an aesthetic eye, patience, and determination. The skill set that is a big plus includes a basic knowledge of digital, SEO, marketing, photography and photoediting, videoediting, and graphic design. So, if you’re not a people person, and tend to be shy and introverted, and hate having your photo taken, expressing yourself via Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are probably not within your comfort zone.
But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t build up an enviable social media presence by hiring a superstar millennial who gets it, or a social media agency or having a current staff member get some training to learn how to rock it. Take yourself out of the equation and bring in the heavy artillery! Enlist a team who can help you reach your goals and take the pressure off. Assign a staff member to be the main liaison for any external vendors to be sure that HIPAA and patient privacy regulations are followed to the letter, and maintain a high level of ethics and professionalism that represents the practice culture you want to convey to peers and patients.
Common errors for medical practices attempting to use social media to promote their products and services abound. It’s also easy to get frustrated when you do not see a daily increase in follower counts and likes, shares and regrams.
Here, we have compiled a list of the top 20 for your reference.
- Sporadic, irregular and inconsistent social media engagement
- Not following the right target audience to gain new followers
- Putting too much focus on pushing out discounts, deals and “Buy Now” messages that turn users of
- Failing to understand how social media marketing really works
- Lack of originality and creativity in your content
- Not working off a formal content calendar and just posting randomly with no strategy
- Not posting enough or high quality content to make an impact
- Just saying NO to video
- Not allocating a sufficient budget for sponsored posts, boosted posts and social ads to get your content seen
- Using only plain text posts without additional visual interest – zzzzzz!
- Creating wordy content – think in phrases, short strings of impactful words, rather than long run-on sentences
- Bombarding followers with fuzzy, out of focus images that are not appealing to the naked eye – invest in photo editing apps and filters!
- Not using the right hashtags – both popular ones (like #plasticsurgery or #dermatologist) and some ownable ones for your brand (like #AskDrJohan or #BeautybyJohan)
- Posting garden variety, tired, boring content when you can’t think of anything clever or interesting to say
- Throwing your hands up in despair when you hit a roadblock!
