We understand that social media is one of the hardest aspects of digital marketing. If you're just starting to build your presence on social media platforms, we've got you covered with tips to put you on the map, make your practice highly instagrammable, and more. Plus, if you're constantly testing and analyzing the types of posts that your followers enjoy with the help of user data, you can better inform all of your future posts.
We want to help you get it right, so we've come up with 6 optical marketing tips to share the top 3 things you definitely should be doing and 3 things you definitely shouldn't. What are some social media strategies that have worked the best for your eyecare practice?
6 Optical Marketing Tips for Getting it Right on Social Media
3 Things You Shouldn't be Doing
Overdosing on Self Promotion
While there are times when your social media pages can be used for marketing and promotion, you could be doing so much more with your pages. Your followers are paying attention to you because they're looking for information that will help them. But when is promotion appropriate? A couple examples include when you have new frames in stock that you want to show off, or you're running a special discount that your followers will want to take advantage of. Otherwise, provide your followers with educational and entertaining content.
Ignoring Your Community
One of the biggest benefits of having social pages is to open up another channel of communication with your patients and to engage your community in meaningful conversations. When someone writes you a message, comments on a post, or provides feedback make sure someone on your team is posting a response, even if it's as quick as thanking them for their comments.
Another way to stay involved in your social communities is to share content from other local businesses that your practice follows. This will help with cross promoting. The more you share from other local businesses the more likely they are to share content from you, which will help get your brand exposed to more people.
Trying to Do It All
These days there are all kinds of social platforms that your business can be a part of, but we recommend starting out with one or two (like Facebook and Instagram) and adding more only once you've proven success and understand what your audience engages with on those channels. It takes time to create a community and keep up with a regular post schedule, but it's worth it when it becomes effective at attracting new patients.
3 Things You Should be Doing
Using Images
As a personal user of Facebook, how often are you scrolling through your newsfeed only looking at the latest images, and skipping over the text heavy posts? We all do it, and that's the reason why images get way more attention on social channels. Using images should come naturally since you're aware of how much easier it is to digest images on social media versus a block of text. You can use images to showcase products or to highlight the day-to-day life in your practice. We also highly recommend searching for appropriate and hilarious GIFs through GIPHY to make a more boring announcement, such as a change of hours, more eye-catching.
Asking Questions
One simple way to engage your followers is by asking them questions. It's hard enough to get your posts seen by all of your followers these days, but the more interactions you get on a post, the more people who will see it. So encourage your community by asking questions and being responsive to the people who contribute to your conversation. You can post polls, Q&A videos, or spot-the-difference images that encourage people to comment on your posts. This will help get your posts out there to your followers' networks as well.
Looking at the Negative
Something that we have noticed ourselves on our social and blog content is that a lot of our titles that pose a negative thought like, How to Totally Fail at Hosting an Event in Your Practice or 3 Optical Practice Rookie Mistakes That Lose You Patients, tend to get more readership than articles with a positive headline. This is a marketing mechanism where you present a conflict and make readers curious to know the solution. This could be an idea to consider when working up posts for your social pages to test what gets more interactions. We're not saying to be negative all of the time - that would be tiring, but it could be a good way to spice up your content mix!
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