Social media and content marketing are the leaders of digital marketing. They help you attract and engage more patients. The expansion and necessity of the Internet have made it necessary for your practice to utilize the power of social media to attract more patients. To avoid making social media marketing mistakes, you need to learn some of the major changes in the world of social media that will affect your practice growth. Let’s see what are these and how they will affect the online presence of your practice.
Popularity of Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories will be the leaders this year. Your story stays online for 24 hours that offers apt information without overdoing with content. These story videos help you showcase your services and can be viewed by all your target audience.
You can do keyword tagging or add filters and text to attract more audience. Clickable tags allow marketing services effectively by conducting polls or asking questions. Also, Instagram Stories offer trackable metrics and location tagging. The popularity of Instagram Stories has outshined Snapchat viewers, so don’t risk to miss this opportunity to grow the online presence of your practice.
Live streaming videos
Live streaming is another booming trend of social media. Facebook and other platforms offer this feature and are used by numerous people of all age groups and at any time of the day. Thanks to smartphones and the Internet speed! For successful usage of this feature, you need to know what time most of your target audience is online and decide the content to be streamed.
Chatbots and apps
To offer a better patient experience, you should take help of chatbots. You can’t be present for your patients all the time, this is where bots turn out to be of great help. Chatbots and messaging apps will provide a personalized feel to your patients and help them share their feedback and queries. The more you communicate with your target audience the better practice you can create for them.
Declining of organic search
Organic reach is likely to get killed this year, especially by Facebook, since a number of businesses are strengthening their presence on social media. You need to be selective about what and where to post. To reach your target audience via News Feed, you will be required to pay something to the platform. You will need to understand the pay-to-play world for sharing your relevant content. This year you need to focus on investment in paid ads and influential content to be posted on social media platforms instead of just creating accounts everywhere.
Videos
Videos are booming like anything, not just on social media platform but everywhere on the Internet. According to a report from Cisco, 82 percent of Internet traffic will be from the video this year. According to HootSuite, people prefer watching the video over plain text. Facebook videos and live streaming of Instagram videos are a good example to prove it. In 2017, video advertising grew by more than 130 percent.
Also, the growing popularity of Internet browsing on mobile phones have made mobile video quite popular. Videos offer higher engagement and a better understanding of a topic. For people who are not interested in reading lengthy articles, prefer videos over blogs.
User-generated content
You are well aware of the importance of online reviews and how they affect the decision of a patient when deciding to visit a practice. So, you need to have patient-focused content for your practice and social media platforms are the best way to reach them. A user-generated content will engage your target audience and motivate them to share their views on the content. This will help you get ideas for new content generation and increase your interaction with existing and new patients. Then, your patients are likely to get more comfortable with you.
Also, make use of Facebook stories to share a relevant content because these short-spanned stories are quite popular among generation Z. Ephemeral content is in demand over Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. You can use it to showcase your new service, offer, upcoming project etc.