After your website, your social media presence is like your second home on the web.
On your site, people can learn about you and your practice, read reviews and recommendations, get your contact info, and even message your business directly.
All told, Facebook is one of the greatest influencers in purchase decisions and continues to integrate new features to help businesses connect with their audience and generate new business.
Ultimately, every LASIK practice should have an active, vibrant social media presence. Nevertheless, not many do.
In part, this is certainly because of the work involved in keeping up with it. If you aren’t particularly tech-savvy, it can take a while to set up your business page properly and then generate engaging, interesting content on a consistent basis.
Many LASIK practice owners are also not convinced that social media is worth the time, which is
why we’ve put together this short list of ways that social media can be a huge help to your LASIK practice.
1) Generating and Displaying Reviews
On business pages, Facebook prioritizes reviews and recommendations at the top of the feed, meaning they are one of the first things someone visiting your page will see.
This is incredibly important since 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from their friends. This is called social proof, meaning someone trusts a business more when they see that others have had a positive experience with the business.
2) Getting Referrals
Facebook has a relatively new feature called Recommendations. This allows someone to post on their newsfeed asking their friends to recommend a particular kind of business. If one of their friends has had a good experience with you, they can link to your page and recommend that their friend checks you out.
If you’re not on Facebook, however, users will have to leave the platform to learn about you, which is an unnecessary step that many won’t take.
3) Humanizing Your Practice
A website is usually a professional representation of your brand. Your social media, on the other hand, is an opportunity to look behind the curtain, displaying the human, authentic side of you and your practice. This can help people feel more comfortable with you, building trust and making it more likely that they’ll reach out to schedule an appointment.
4) Sharing Your Contact Info
A great rule of internet marketing is that you want to make it extremely easy for people to contact you. If they have to look for a phone number or contact form, or if they see different numbers in different places, it can be confusing and lower the chance of them reaching out to you.
That’s why it’s so useful to have your contact information on your Facebook page, which allows people to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
5) Increasing Your Online Visibility
One of the great things about Facebook business pages is that they often rank in search engines. So, if someone is searching for your LASIK practice online, your Facebook page is likely to rank high on the first page, which gives you more online real estate to work with.
No Social Media Is Better than Bad Social Media
One of the important things to keep in mind is that it’s absolutely vital that your Facebook business page is filled out, active, and engaging. If you’re not posting regular content, or maybe didn’t take the time to fill in all of your business information, it can ultimately do more harm than good.
After all, your business page is likely to still rank, and if it looks half-baked then it might actually signal the very opposite of what you’re hoping.
If you’re struggling to create or maintain your social media presence, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the LASIK marketing experts at Patient Pipeline to help.
