5 Ways to Improve Facebook for Physical Therapy Practices

Are you disappointed about the lack of success you’re having with Facebook? Perhaps you only have a few people liking your page or nobody is talking about your practice.

If your Facebook activity leaves much to be desired, don’t get disheartened.

It takes time to build and grow a loyal following of fans and to create a community. Social media marketing takes patience and long-term thinking, but the investment in time and effort certainly pays off when it is done well. That is why so many small physical therapy practices are willing to invest in marketing on social media sites such as Facebook: because they see great rewards from it.

Here are 5 main reasons why your Facebook campaigns may not be working for you and how you can make them right:

1. You Don’t Have a Social Media Strategy

Some private practices set up a Facebook page because they know their patients expect them to have one or because their competitors have one. But when asked what the goal of their Facebook page is, they don’t really have a clue. So, let’s think about your Facebook page for a moment:

• Do you want to get more likes?
• Do you want your Facebook presence to increase awareness about your practice and the services you offer?
• Do you want to increase sales?

Your reasons for having a Facebook page could be one, two or all three reasons, but whatever you want to achieve, you need to have a concise goal and plan of action. Knowing what you want to achieve will help you to determine what tools and marketing strategies you need to use in order to make it work.

2. You Don’t Update Your Content Often Enough

After the initial novelty of having a Facebook page wears off, many small practices sadly neglect them a month or two down the line. Then, because they aren’t seeing any results from Facebook, they claim that it doesn’t work.

It’s important to remember the only reason anybody would ever want to visit your Facebook page is because of the content. Simply put, if you don’t post anything, then nobody will bother to visit your page. Even if the content you posted a few days, weeks or months ago was fantastic, you can’t afford to rest on your laurels. We live in a fast-paced world where information quickly becomes outdated or people just move on to the next big thing, so it’s vital that you post often. But how often? At the very least, it should be once a day, but four or five times a day would be better. Follow some of the big companies and study how they engage their followers by adding quick pithy posts that grab the attention and encourage commenting.

3. Yawn…Your Posts Are So Boring!

If you look at the posts big companies and savvy business owners add to their pages, their content is light-hearted and fun. It entertains their followers so they keep coming back for more. They give away coupons, have contests and engage their fans. That is the secret: providing content your followers want to read. When people visit your page, they don’t want to read sales promotions or posts all about you. It needs to be fun and interesting.

So as the owner of a private physical therapy practice you could:

• Post videos of patients who were satisfied with the treatment they received
• Blog about important physical therapy news to educate patients
• Describe some of the most common treatments offered by your practice; you can include video of some of these treatments too
• Introduce your staff in a fun way to help patients better connect with them
• Include pictures or videos showing people around your practice

The list is endless but you can see how you need to make the content relevant to your practice, but at the same time interesting enough to engage with your followers and get them talking about you.

4. It is all text and you don’t include photos or graphics

Visual content is essential on Facebook. Visitors literally only have a minute or so to visit your page, so if you are posting long messages people are not going to read them, no matter how interesting or informative they might be.

[note_box]To be successful on Facebook it will be worth your while to invest in posting your own good quality pictures that attract attention. These can be about your practice or service, so include photos of your premises, your staff, and the results of treatment. You can even visit sites like Pinterest and re-pin images that you find to your Facebook page. Again, look at how other companies use images for inspiration.[/note_box]

5. Your Facebook Page is Anonymous and Your Brand is Invisible

Facebook is extremely popular. It enables you to reach a huge worldwide audience and it would be a crime to not use it to its full potential by not clearly branding your page.

By having a clearly branded page and addressing the previous four issues, your Facebook campaign will be far more successful and you will increase your chances of attracting more loyal patients over time.

If you need help and want to learn more about how to use Facebook to your full advantage so that you too can bring in more patients on a regular basis, contact us at E-Rehab so we can share some additional Facebook tactics with you and help you create a laser targeted branded page.

This will help your practice engage more with a wider target audience and encourage them to spend more time on your profile. Call us for some exciting advice that will transform your online presence and attract extra patients to help your practice grow.