How To: Create a Successful Social Media Strategy For Your Physiotherapy Practice

Your social media content has the power to turn your brand into a household name. An impact of this magnitude can only about form having an effective social media strategy.

There are a few steps you must take to stand out on social media, those are:

1. Identify specific and realistic goals
2. Create valuable posts that support those goals
3. Distribute content on the right platforms

Your strategy will be different based on your target audience and industry.

Identify and Set Realistic Goals
The first step towards any strategy really is to set realistic content goals that you will be able to achieve in the time frame that you’ve set for yourself. However the first step is to assess why you’re on social media in the first place, what are you trying to accomplish? This involves asking yourself questions like what are your brand values and what is your target audience?. The more specific your goals are, the better you will be able to create and plan your social media content.

Here are some examples of common goals and objectives:

• Drive conversions
• Build connections with potential customers
• Establish yourself as an expert in your industry
• Increase brand awareness

Auditing is Key
Once you establish your goals, a social media content audit is in order. This involves looking at which posts performed well, which ones didn’t and on what platforms. The first step can be choosing your social media channels. You should choose this by:

1. Seeing which social media channels you’re already on.
2. Determining which channels you should keep and which channels you should abandon.
3. Deciding which channels you should add (if there are any, that is)

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest Business and LinkedIn Business accounts let you easily export/share your post and page analytics are available directly from the platform. What you look for in the audit should support your content goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve brand awareness, then look at your follower count on each platform and identify which posts resulted in new followers.

Accurate auditing should also provide you with up to date info on other things like:

1. Your audience, info about their demographics, buyer personas
2. Goals for each account and platform
3. Your most successful posts campaigns and strategies
4. Niches, underwhelming results, and room for improvement
5. Key metrics for measuring future success on each platform

Don’t forget that no matter what content you create, you should stick with your unique brand voice and create content that authentically markets your brand. .

Optimize Your Social Media Channels
This step is pretty straight forward; it means to make sure that your social media channels are fully completed. It sounds easy but it’s often overlooked.

1. Are your bio sections filled out?
2. Have you included information on how customers can contact you and where they can find you?
3. Have you included backlinks to your site?
4. Are profile photos and cover photos in place?

Content Promotion and Distribution
Planning and publishing your content is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to having a successful social media strategy. The next important step is find ways to distribute your content so that it is seen by as many people as possible.

You can encourage your following to engage with your content by asking a question, having them answer polls, quizzes and even through giveaways. You can encourage them to comment on your social media posts or on a blog post.

Other people sharing your content is excellent social proof as well. Your social media content strategy should include actively responding to and/or reposting people who share your content so that they feel seen and feel like you care about their engagement.

Measure Results
The last most important step to a successful social media content strategy is measuring the results.. Tracking your results is going to be vital to creating a strategy that is successful long term. Keeping detailed metrics will help you optimize and improve your strategy constantly over time. Ideally, you should analyze your content every month to keep track of what’s working and more importantly, what’s not working.
When analyzing your data, take a look at how each piece of content performed and why did it perform well or otherwise. Assess how well the content contributed to the overall content goals that you set in step one.

A few important social media metrics to measure include:

1. Awareness – The number of times people saw your content as told by impressions and reach
2. Engagements – The number of reactions, comments, clicks and shares your content gets
3. ROI – Conversions and referrals from external sources

ABOUT DIGITAL PRACTICE

Led by Marketing expert, Muireann Fitzmaurice, DigitalPractice.ie is a social media agency that create branded social media content for professional practice owners. It is a subscription service that provides physiotherapy-based content to the practice owner on a monthly basis that can  be used on all social media channels. Saving you time and headspace each month to concentrate on other areas of the business.