If you’re suffering from “Social Media Marketing Overwhelm,” you are not alone.
Keeping up with social media is an ongoing challenge for most businesses, small and big alike. Most find it daunting to keep creating content for their social media channels.
And keeping up with the ever-changing social media landscape is another challenge all by itself.
Adding social media to what you’re already doing, not only drains your physical resources, but it also drains your “creative juices.”
Because you must continually come up with ideas for content:
- You can share with your readers
- To educate your readers
- That builds trust and relationships with your readers
… not a small task!
As challenging as it is to keep up, social media is where your customers are. And if you want to attract more customers to your practice, you need to meet them where they are… social media!
The question is, how can you keep up with the demands of social media without pulling out your hair or losing your mind?
Here are three simple strategies to help take out a big bite from your social media overwhelm!
Social Media Marketing: Goals
Your business goals and objectives should be the foundation for all your marketing, including social media.
What do you hope to achieve with your social media marketing? Do you have clear and measurable goals in mind?
And how do these goals relate to the overall marketing strategies, goals, and activities for your practice? All your marketing activities should be executed in support of your “big goal.”
They should share the same objective, such as attracting new patients and strengthen relationships with current patients.
When you have a clear objective for your social media marketing, it gets easier to create and share content supporting your goals.
But if you lack clarity, invariably you’ll find yourself struggling to come up with new ideas, that’s if you can muster the stamina to stay the course.
Social Media Marketing: Platforms
How many social media platforms do you utilize? Are you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google”, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, etc.…
Here’s the thing…
You can’t be everywhere, and if you are, you’re spread way too thin.
While some may disagree, here is what I am suggesting.
Find out the social media platforms your patients or customers utilize and focus on them. Forget about the rest; stick to one or two social media platforms. Focus on them and create more and better content for these channels.
When you’re involved with too many channels, not only does it take more time, you won’t necessarily get better results.
So here are the three most prominent, most utilized social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Facebook is the biggest platform of them all, and it’s still growing.
So how do you determine where your patients are?
Ask them! Do it either on your intake from or when they come back for follow-up visits.
Next, you can get demographic information right from the social media platforms.
These companies can tell you gender, age, income, profession, and much more about their users. They have so much information on us that it’s outright scary.
Of course, there is always Google, and it’s just a search away!
Social Media Marketing: Content
And here’s the million dollar question: “How do you keep cranking out all the content you need to keep up with your social media channels?”
Hopefully, by now, you’re focusing on one, maybe two social media platforms and have let go of the rest.
But regardless if you follow the advice or not, it still takes time and effort to create content, even if you focus on only one or two platforms.
And that’s why need a strategy…
Consider implementing a content strategy for your social media marketing; one that ties back to the overall objectives for your practice.
As I said before, ideally the majority of content published to your social media platform is in alignment with business objectives.
Granted, while this will not always be the case, more often than not, your social media efforts should align with your overall marketing goals.
Your Primary Marketing Calendar
To achieve your marketing goals, I suggest you create a general and a social media marketing calendar.
Why two calendars you ask? Well, think of it like this…
Your primary marketing calendar directs all your marketing efforts for your practice. Let’s say you develop a calendar outlining the marketing activities for your practice over the next six months to a year.
Developing a primary marketing calendar, allows you to take advantage of national holidays, health observance days, birthdays, local health fairs, and community events.
You can use these events to market your practice. Depending on your area of specialization you could:
- Publish an article about diabetes or hold a screening event to mark World Diabetes Day on November 14.
- Blog about heart health or sponsor an event during the American Heart Month in February.
However, without a primary marketing calendar, you won’t know about upcoming events and couldn’t leverage them; you’d always be running behind.
No Time?
Now before you think you don’t have time and it’s too much work…
You can keep this simple and easily create your primary calendar by focusing on one marketing activity per month. Maybe you’ll go out and give a talk, hold an open house, or do a mailing; one activity and you’re done for the month.
Add to it a few articles to publish to your website around health observances or holidays, and you’re actively marketing your practice – ongoing.
Your Social Media Marketing Calendar
Repeat the same for your social media marketing.
Again, the key to success here is developing a system (aka calendar) in sync with your main marketing calendar.
You’ll “re-use” themes from your primary calendar and carry them through to your social media marketing.
For example, you might post excerpts from your articles, snippets from events you hosted, or post highlights from national and international health observances.
Your social media calendar specifies the content and the format to use, in alignment with the primary calendar.
The sky is the limit to what you could post and share. Best of all, you no longer need to reinvent the wheel!
Working from your marketing calendar allows you to prepare any marketing content ahead of time and in alignment with your overall marketing goals.
Just check your calendar to see what’s on the agenda for the coming week or month.
And here’s one more thing…
Make sure you post your content, so it’s easy to consume. Today, most of us quickly scan our feeds, and it’s up to you to grab our attention.
Utilize these formats, so your readers stop and take note of what you have to share:
- Images get attention: “A picture is worth a thousand words”; find the right image to support your message
- Short videos
- Surveys increase engagement with your readers
- Snippets from existing content: re-use articles from your blog or website
- Quotes; people love them
- Questions engage your readers
And always remember this…
- What’s posted on social media stays on social media. And it’s not just what you post, but what others post about you too.
- Be careful what you write and how you react to what’s posted; that includes pictures and videos too.
- And finally, consider keeping your personal social media separate from your business social media presence.
Put what you’ve learned to the test and let us know how it goes. Leave your comment below; we’d love to hear from you…
By Johanna Hofmann, MBA, LAc; regular contributor to the NPBusiness blog and author of “Smart Business Planning for Clinicians.“