When it comes to Internet marketing, most businesses have made the effort to try and have a presence on at least one of the popular social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube.

These sites are viewed as the fun cousins of the social media world, the sites everyone seems to want to play with. But private practices such as yours need to realize that they are not the only networking opportunities worth using.

LinkedIn is a very well known but hugely underrated and underused avenue of opportunity. Most people view LinkedIn as the “stuffed shirt” of networking, and it’s true that if you go to LinkedIn, you won’t find a video of someone falling down or a cute picture of a cat hanging on a washing line.  But that is by no means bad thing. We are talking about professional networking here.

Each networking site attracts a different set of potential clients, and LinkedIn is no different. In fact, you could even find yourself networking and promoting your practice to more important people than you ever thought possible.

If you still need convincing of the power of LinkedIn to help your private practice, then take a few minutes to look through these reasons why your practice should be on LinkedIn too:

LinkedIn: Business, not Pleasure

Google any business or business person, and one of the first page entries in the search results will almost certainly be their LinkedIn profile (if they have one). These profile pages contain everything you want to know about the person or company, their products and services, and more.

What alternative does a potential patient have if you don’t give them the information they are looking for yourself? Their only option is to go and look for the opinions of others in random blog entries and consumer forums, and you have no control over what is being said there, good or bad.

Engaging Conversations

An essential element of any network is not simply to attract people to your profile, but to engage with and retain your audience for the long term.  But while contact between users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter revolves around relaxed social interaction, LinkedIn is a business-orientated network.  So if you can’t post pictures of cute animals in amusing situations, how can you keep interest in your brand going?

a) Daily Status Update

LinkedIn has many useful features, but none are as easy to use as the “Status Update.”  These status updates appear in the feeds of those who are following your business page and in the feeds of other LinkedIn members who are networked to your followers.  So by posting an update on a daily basis, you are expanding both the exposure of your brand to more potential patients and giving more people the opportunity to network with your practice.

b) Use A Poll

Polls are a simple yet versatile way of gathering useful information from your followers while still keeping them engaged.  You can find out all sorts of relevant information about your potential patients here: what they would like to discuss in the group, information about the group members themselves.  Or you can use them just as a way of starting the conversation.

c) Useful Feedback

As LinkedIn members are business people themselves, use the opportunity to gather useful and significant feedback.  Asking questions which relate directly to your practice can get you some incredibly valuable insights into both how your brand is seen and in learning more about what your potential patients need and want from the services and treatments offered by you.

Don’t Do It Alone: Join A Group

When first joining any network, it’s only natural to start to connect with the people that you know. But in business, you constantly need to be looking for opportunities to increase the number of people you can showcase your practice to. LinkedIn is perfect for that.

As you accept invites from other LinkedIn members, your networking potential and business profile grows.  You don’t have to be shy in extending invitations to other members to connect with you either, especially if you think they will complement your own services.

Remember, it’s not just one connection you are making. Connecting with other LinkedIn members also joins you to their network of contacts, growing both your own associated network of contacts and the amount of potential traffic to your LinkedIn business page.

Groups are a great way to find and join like-minded business people. Look to join various groups associated with physical therapy and rehabilitation in any way.

Once you have the confidence, you can take it further and create your own groups around different aspects of the physical therapy industry.

Not only will you be increasing the number of business contacts you have, but you will be actively taking and spreading the knowledge and awareness of your practice throughout the LinkedIn business network.

The Power of Recommendations

To a potential patient, nothing gives more confidence than to hear someone do more than just praise your services, but to give it an outright recommendation. It says more than “I am happy with it”; it says to someone, “You need to use them too. They helped me recover from my injury so quickly that I had to tell you to use them if you ever need physical therapy.”

The “Recommendation” is a unique feature that separates LinkedIn from other Social networking sites. On LinkedIn, these recommendations, made by both clients and colleagues, allow others to give your practice and professionalism a glowing report.

Get Found

You want your LinkedIn profile to increase your visibility on the Internet and contribute to your rankings in the search engine results.  By adjusting some of your profile wording, you can improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your LinkedIn site.

Inside the “Websites” section, adding keywords to the title descriptions found in the “Other” section will increase your page’s visibility on the Internet searches.

When starting to complete your LinkedIn profile, keep key industry keywords and buzz terms in mind.

Try to subtly add a few key search terms your patients may use when looking for your services, but don’t stuff your profile with them as search engines like Google and Bing can penalize your site if there is an overload of keywords.

Don’t overlook your URLs. When you join and create your LinkedIn profile and pages, LinkedIn automatically creates the URLs with random numbers, not a name, but these links are customizable. Change it to something the search engines can pick up on: your name, job title or location  By being creative, you may even be able to get keywords in.

Statistical Analysis

Studying statistical data may not be everybody’s favourite task, but it gives an impression of how effective your LinkedIn profile is, and within LinkedIn you can get detailed facts and figures on who is visiting your page, how often they come, how many times someone clicks through the “Services” tab, which members are following your page, and a whole wealth of other stats broken down into very useful information.

But there are even more targeted marketing opportunities available to practices like yours on LinkedIn.

The Admin of a business page can set up customized Product and Services pages.

This means when a visitor comes through to your page, the information shown to them will be tailored to them depending on things like: How local they are to your practice; what business they are in; what position they hold in their company.

Being able to modify information in this way enables you to give other LinkedIn members more relevant information about your practice.

Network Your Network

Maximizing your exposure is a fundamental key in getting new followers, so the easier you can make it to follow you the better. LinkedIn has 2 easy ways to do this:

“Follow Company” Button

By putting this button on your site, it lets followers connect quickly, and they can then track your LinkedIn activity easily and conveniently from within their own LinkedIn profile. Once your followers have grown to a decent number, add the number of your followers onto this button.

“Share” Button

By adding this button to the articles and content in your LinkedIn pages, you show your page visitors that they can share articles from your site with their own followers.

By making your articles informative and useful to others, you encourage others to take your knowledge and expertise in the physical therapy field to a much wider audience of potential patients.

Market To A Captive Audience

With a rapidly growing membership of over 175 million business professionals worldwide, it would be a criminal oversight not to consider marketing your practice to such a captive audience inside LinkedIn.

Not only does LinkedIn offer its business users ad campaigns with a massive audience, the ads themselves are immensely flexible and customizable.

Available as Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression, the ads can be tailored to an exact audience based on a specific customer demographic like the size of the company, the business area, and occupation, to name just a few factors.

These ads can also be shown on specific pages. So you could target profile pages, practice and group pages, member’s inbox or message pages, and more.

This type of targeted approach helps in getting the relevant information to the right sector of your audience: your potential patients.

There is also a choice of Ad Type:

• Display Ad: An ad that can be placed on the page in a range of shapes and sizes, rather like a classified newspaper ad.
• Content Ad: An ad that lets you stream several types of contend in one organized packet – like video, Twitter, Status updates, etc.
• Text Link Ad: A static html link to a specific page or place.
• Social Ad: Social ads are a highly targeted, highly efficient way to sign up fellow LinkedIn members and to encourage them to share messages and recommend products.

They encourage a particular course of action like the ‘Follow’, ‘Recommend’ or ‘Join Group’ ads.

Upgrade and Expand With Advanced Apps

Once you have a good working knowledge of LinkedIn, it’s time to take your LinkedIn page to the next level with some of the many advanced applications that allow you to give your LinkedIn pages greater appeal and marketing power.

Here are just a few of the great “Advanced Apps” available to use with LinkedIn:

SLIDESHARE

Rather than having a simple static photogallery of business statistics, you can really impress visitors with a professional and visually interesting slideshow presentation.

MY TRAVEL

This app lets you share all your future travel plans and trips with your network, so they can see not only where you are now but where you are going to be and when.

This gives people a great opportunity to arrange to meet up for different events and functions.

BOX.NET

If you have something you’d like to share with your followers, why not make it downloadable?  Box.net lets you share everything from photographs to portfolios, charts and presentations.

BLOG LINK

Linking your blog up to your LinkedIn page is so easy with Blog Link.

If you use WordPress, there are many specialist WordPress app or plug-ins that can do it for you simply and easily.

HUDDLE WORKSPACES

Collaborations can be notoriously tricky things.

Huddle Workspaces is designed to smooth out this rocky road. It lets you give different groups their own workspace, which means you can provide private remote access to documents that only they will see and have access to in their workspace.

TWEET

We couldn’t possibly forget the social network that many businesses use daily.

Tweets lets you access and use your Twitter account from inside LinkedIn.

Do you feel inspired to explore the world of LinkedIn?

Or have you previously registered but didn’t know about many of the features that we mentioned or have not had much success with it? If so, please contact E-Rehab.

So many small private practices have either don’t understand LinkedIn or have not used it to its full potential.  As a result they are missing out on a lot of potential patients and useful connections.

We look forward to hearing from you and sharing our insider knowledge and ideas with you.[/colored_box]

TIP 4: CREATE YOUR PRACTICE BUSINESS PAGE

Last week I discussed 3 TIPS to help you make the most of LinkedIn when trying to hire a new PT for your practice. This week I am going to provide you with a 4th tip that will help improve your business’ presence on LinkedIn. Below are some procedures on how to create and optimize your LinkedIn business page.

Set up your page:

Just like your practice’s Facebook page, you can also set up your LinkedIn business page. To do so, click on the “Companies” icon on the upper tab of your profile.

Then click on the “Add a company” link on the upper right-hand corner. The first window will appear and ask you the name of the company and your email address that you are using for your company.

Note: your business email address should NOT be a generic account (e.g. @gmail.com or similar). It has to be an email address that is using the company domain name (if you do not have one, call me and I will explain to you the benefit of having one and how to do it). Check the box to verify that you are an authorized representative of the company and hit continue. LinkedIn will send you an automatic message to verify the email address you just provided. Next, fill in the necessary information about your company (e.g. size, type of ownership, industry, website, year founded and specialties).

1. Pay attention to the description you provide for your practice overview. Avoid excessive text which forces the viewer to scroll down the page.
2. Include the phrase “physical therapy in YOUR TOWN” (e.g. physical therapy in Encinitas) to help with search engine listings.
3. Remember, your target audience is potential staff members, not new patients. A “very flexible schedule” for appointments may be very attractive for your patients but not so much for your potential employees.
4. Focus your message on the unique culture of your practice and what makes it remarkable.
5. You will be able to modify this overview after your page is set up; so, do not hesitate to tailor your message to your current staffing needs.

Add your services:

After you write a great practice overview that will catch the attention of your target, you can focus on the presentation of your services. From the company home page go to the “Edit” icon (upper right-hand corner), click on the arrow and select the “Add a product or service” option.

You will be taken to a page where you can complete your service tab in 11 steps. Don’t worry, it’s painless 🙂 Fill in the different items and do not forget to add a picture. This is the first thing that people will see when landing on your services page. I also suggest that you add a video presentation of your practice (step 11). This will give a prospects a better sense of the atmosphere and culture at your practice.

To create a free video slideshow of your practice, use a service like www.animoto.com

When you are done click “Publish” and LinkedIn will automatically post an update on your page saying you added a product or a service. If you want to modify it click on the “Product & Services” tab.

Next, click on the product you want to modify and click edit.

When you are done click “Publish” and LinkedIn will let all your company followers know that you updated your service. The “Product & Services” tab on LinkedIn is not a place where you want to showcase all the services you provide. Instead I suggest that you concentrate on 4-5 items maximum…the ones that differentiate your practice or in which you have the most expertise.

Job posts:

Let’s now talk about how you can support your recruiting efforts with your company page.

The first level of subscription service on LinkedIn will let you add complete job descriptions on your “Career” tab. The higher level will allow LinkedIn members to apply for a position via their professional platform. However, this is not something I recommend for a small private practice. Chances are you won’t get a good return on your investment. Instead, I suggest you post your job descriptions on your practice website and then post a link to them on your LinkedIn Company page. This way all your followers will see it, as well as all people visiting your website.

To do so, go to the “Home” tab of your company page and write your update on the top of the page in the white rectangle. Copy and paste the link to the job description on your website, like the example below.

If your link is correct a second new box with your website preview will appear. When you are satisfied with your post select to whom the post will be visible (e.g. All followers) and hit share.

Final Thoughts:

If you want your company page to be an asset for your practice, you should commit to the following:

• Let all your connections on LinkedIn know that you created your practice page, i.e. by posting an update on your LinkedIn profile, and encourage them to become followers of your page.
• Keep your company page alive by posting regular updates about your practice. It could be job posts, services updates, welcoming the arrival of a new staff member, or a special event or promotion. This will show candidates that you own an tech savvy practice, and will be more appealing than a page that has not been updated in months.

This concludes my 4 tips on how to make the most of LinkedIn for free.

If you have questions or comments please feel free to drop us a line on the comment section. Let us know what topics you would like to know more about!