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A surprising 41% of people said that social media would influence their choice of a specific healthcare provider or medical clinic. If you aren’t using social media to capture attention for your products, services, or treatments, you may be missing out on a huge growth opportunity.
If you want to reach more potential patients or develop a new, loyal client base, you need to be on social media. These are some of the best ways to grow your social media presence and get more bookings, consultations, and appointments.
Health and Wellness Affect Everything We Do
Social media is the perfect opportunity to have more relaxed, but still informative, conversations with your ideal clients or patients. While there’s a time and place for pitching your products and services, your primary goal on any social media network should be building a community or like-minded people with similar health issues or goals.
Social media gives you a place to share tips, resources, and links to important information. You’ll also be able to be the expert in the space by answering questions and giving people the opportunity to see the results from your products or services.
By finding the right blend of quality content to share, you can give your social media followers a holistic perspective of your services and skills and turn those likes and follows into clients and customers.
Your Community is Hanging Out on Social Media
When you create a safe online space for people to come to get up to the minute and accurate health and wellness information, your initial followers will soon begin inviting their friends and families. It’s natural that when a person starts on a wellness journey, they want to bring others along. Or, if they lack support in real life, your virtual community could be just what they need to take the next step and seek your services.
By creating a group of people who are all interested in your wellness niche and promoting positive engagement, you’ll see an increase in lead generation and prospects move from social to your website and then into your clinic or spa.
Make sure your community has a flow of information – don’t just share information. Ask questions. People love to share their stories, tips and resources. Encourage your social media followers to share posts and to invite friends through tagging.
Do More of What You Like to Promote Your Health or Wellness Practice
With so many platforms out there, we won’t make any specific site recommendations here. But the two things to consider when choosing where you spend your professional time on social: where your customers hang out on social and what you like to do.
When you lean into your strengths and you know your audience, it’s easy to pick the right social channels. You’ll also find it’s much easier to create content when you’re using a platform that makes sense to you.
Pro tip: You may not love being on camera personally, but this is one thing where you might need to get out of your comfort zone. Almost every social channel prioritizes video content so you can really depress your reach if you don’t share at least some video content. For the introvert, there are plenty of video options that allow you to highlight your knowledge or create helpful tutorials without a lot of on-screen time.
When you take your personal strengths into account and do more of what you’re comfortable with on social media, your community will connect with that positive vibe.
Share Authentically to Develop a Loyal Brand Following
It’s easy to get caught up in being just like your competitors. There are a lot of health and wellness brands out there. It’s a competitive and noisy space.
But the beauty of your message is in its authenticity. Bringing your unique talents, passions, skills, and training to your social media messaging is what will energize your community and create the connection that turns them into loyal customers and clients.
By sharing authentically with your followers, you naturally build trust. And the truth is, health and wellness is an industry where trust has been eroded by people who make false claims and promises. You can rise above that by showing the human side of your brand and keeping the tone helpful and positive.
Make yourself memorable by standing out with unique images and offers. Don’t be afraid to be yourself when you’re developing your content and finding the right blend. By sharing your favorite tips and tricks along with the occasional meme or joke, you let people feel closer to you. That connection and goodwill accelerate the sales cycle.
Keep The Focus on The People You Want to Help
Your health and wellness practice is dealing with real people with real emotions. Some may even have frightening health concerns.
Make sure your messages are client-focused and that you focus on the benefits of your products or services. It can be easy to want to spend all your social media marketing minutes making sales, but social is well…social.
Following the 80/20 rule with your content shows your social followers that your concern isn’t just about your bottom line, but also about their well-being.
These are some of the best content ideas to attract, connect with, eventually convert your ideal customers and clients:
Social Media Thrives on Social Proof
When you’re getting good results, you need to shout it from the rooftops. Of course, you should always make sure that you’re on top of any compliance issues before posting. Your successful clients will probably be flattered to be featured in your marketing materials. Reviews are one of the biggest drivers of new business for any type of health or wellness practice.
Social proof, like before and afters or client testimonials, shortens the buying cycle. When a potential client sees you’ve helped people just like them solve similar problems, it increases their confidence in your products and services.
You probably have testimonials on your website, but for a lot of prospective customers and patients, their first exposure to your brand will be on social media. When you share positive outcomes and big wins on your social posts, it inspires your community to act. It could mean visiting your website to schedule an appointment or just to do a little more research.
Keep Your Finger on The Pulse of What’s Trending and Share Your Perspective
When it comes to health information, it’s easy for your ideal clients and patients to be overwhelmed. Or to miss important studies or research that can directly impact their health or treatment protocols. They’re counting on professionals like you to make scientific studies understandable.
That’s why curating content from reputable sources is huge. It gives you an opportunity to showcase your expertise without requiring you to create all the content you share with your online community. It’s very valuable to your followers for you to give your take on trending topics, articles, blog posts, and new research.
You don’t always have to write something yourself to get the benefit of credibility.
By sharing hot topics in your niche and putting your personal spin on it, you also reassure people that you keep up with changes happening in your industry.
Create Fresh Content That Your Community Craves
It’s totally fair game to lean on well-written content but creating your own industry-related content is essential to earn the trust of your online community members. Blog articles typically don’t get published first to social media, but a well-researched quality blog article can be repurposed into several engaging social posts.
Take your audience from social to your practice website by sharing your blogs on your most popular social channels. By producing regular, authoritative content, your social can potentially contribute to and improve your Google page ranking, too.
If you’re time limited, try to produce as much evergreen content as you can. Evergreen content is always relevant to your audience and stays fresh for a long time before it needs to be revisited and updated.
If you’re got more time for blogging? Try creating articles related to events, holidays, or special promotions.
Sprinkle in Some Hashtags
It’s crazy how effective hashtags are for widening your audience and attracting new people to your business or clinic. By using the right blend of popular, memorable, and unique hashtags you can get more eyes and more buzz building in your community.
Choosing hashtags is part of building your overall branding or marketing strategy. It’s smart to create an association between terms your ideal customers are already looking for online and putting some energy into building engagement around branded or specialized hashtags.
Hashtags always kick off with a #, but no spaces or punctuation marks can be included. Keep them punchy and relevant. Too obscure and no one will find it. Think about things your audience is looking for and jump on those trending tags.
As your audience grows, you may see community members creating hashtags for things that matter to them.
Embrace the energy of user-generated hashtags as your audience and reach expands.
Hashtags can be a great way to get people invested and feeling included in your community.
Show Up Consistently and Put In Your Best Effort
If you’re working in your business, it’s fair to wonder how often you should post on your professional social accounts and pages. Everyone knows that social media can take up a lot of time.
Knowing how much time you can consistently put into working on your social media marketing efforts is half the battle. Show up as often as you know you can and still post high quality, industry related content. If you’re still seeing engagement from your audience, you’re hit the correct cadence.
Set aside time to reply to comments. Social is just that. Social. You’re essentially inviting people to an online gathering of friends. You wouldn’t invite people over to your home or industry networking event and then not say a word to anyone. The algorithms thrive on engagement, and they reward those who put the effort in.
That said, if you’re a busy solo practitioner? You may find that outsourcing the management of your social media is the right decision for you and reaching your business goals.
Hiring an expert gives you the necessary time to serve your patients while having the confidence your online community is getting quality information from your accounts.
Try, Test, and Tweak
Another thing to remember about social is that it takes time to build an audience and see results. Set reasonable goals for your social media marketing efforts. You may find certain posts resonate better with your audience or that those Friday afternoon at 5 p.m. posts aren’t getting much traction.
You’ll want to keep an eye on the analytics panel of your pages and profiles. This way you’ll have a clear picture of where you’re getting your biggest wins. Duplicate your best-performing posts – the ones with the highest views and comments – and post more of those style of posts.
Remember, right now video is getting priority. A strong social media mix must have some video content to get the reach that gets more followers (and future clients!).
The biggest driver of success in your social media strategy is not being afraid to try. From there, you’ll watch, learn, and adjust as your audience tells you what they want more of from your health or wellness practice.
It’s Time to Get Social
There’s no better time than right now to put together a social media strategy for your wellness business. Once you’ve planned your overall digital marketing strategy, you can gather your social media content ideas, and then optimize your posting efforts by analyzing what resonates best with your potential patients.
When your online community members see you having fun with social media, you’ll discover it’s a key marketing tool for building your brand, growing your business, and increasing your revenue.
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