Your physical therapy clinic’s website is your core online presence. It should hold together all of your other internet-based marketing efforts. If you’re trying to reach the greatest number of potential patients, however, you can’t afford to skip over social media marketing.
There are a plethora of different social media platforms that your physiotherapy office can incorporate into your online strategy, but developing and maintaining a useful presence on these websites can require a serious time investment. Most busy clinic managers and physical therapists don’t have the time to build up a following on every platform out there. This makes choosing the most powerful ones an important part of your marketing strategy.
Here are a few social platforms that may just offer the best results for your physical therapy clinic:
Facebook – Everyone uses Facebook. An average of 757 million people are on the site every single day. When it comes to social media, no platform is better equipped for helping you reach your target audience of patients than Facebook is. Although Facebook’s key draw is the enormous number of potential clients that you can reach, it also offers a high level of flexibility when developing your customized social profile.
Twitter – Twitter is a great way to promote news about your physiotherapy clinic or informative updates to your website. Posts on this social platform are limited to 140-characters, so in-depth information sharing isn’t very feasible. Like Facebook, Twitter also has a huge user base and is great for quick blurbs about your office or to point followers towards other, more comprehensive resources. Once your account is set up, creating posts is much less time-intensive than with other platforms.
Google+ - Google+ should be a major asset in any physical therapy clinic’s social marketing strategy. Although it doesn’t have the daily users that Facebook does, it is still widely popular and allows you to reach clients in your social circle with attractive images, detailed resources and sharable content.
LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the most popularly used business-related social platform. If the primary clients that you’re targeting are local professionals, LinkedIn is a great way to reach them directly. Unlike Facebook and Google+ which can maximize your clinic’s exposure, LinkedIn can also be used to provide your physical therapy office with a more professional image and increase you’re perceived level of expertise among your patient’s local options due to its widely-viewed reputation of professionalism.
Pinterest – Unlike most other social platforms which focus on creating a comprehensive profile and posting text updates to expand your reach, Pinterest is centered on a more visual approach of “pinning” images. One powerful way to leverage Pinterest is to create categories of visually-appealing images that can be of use to your potential clients. Smart choices include areas such as recovery tips, exercises patients can perform at home, dietary advice and ways to prevent future injuries. This can be used for both attracting new clients, as well as for an additional resource for existing patients. Out of Pinterest’s 70 million accounts, around 500,000 of them are businesses using the social platform to reach potential customers.
No matter which social media platforms you decide to incorporate into your physical therapy clinic’s online marketing strategy, one thing should remain consistent – the style and appearance of your web presences. By creating stylistic similarities among your various social media accounts, you can better develop your brand awareness. A consistent look is not only more professional, but it can help avoid confusion and increase memorability by potential patients who visit your various social profiles.
On top of being great ways to directly drive traffic to both your primary website and your office, social media profiles can also help with your search engine rankings. Google gives heavy weight to these popular social sites, especially Google+. This means that your physiotherapy clinic’s social profiles can potentially rank highly in local searches. Instead of just appearing once in your area’s physical therapy search results, having highly-developed social profiles may mean occupying more than one spot in the top ten.
Although this strategy may not be very effective in large, highly-competitive markets, it can give physical therapy clinics with less competition a distinct advantage when it comes to generating traffic and additional revenue.
Social media can be a powerful way for you to generate traffic to your website, as well as through your office’s front door. Developing an online presence on numerous social sites can take a lot of time and effort, so it’s important for you to strategically focus on the platforms that will offer you the best results. With popular options like Facebook and Twitter, a sound strategy and dedicated profile management can multiply your reach into your local area’s market of potential patients. Our physical therapy websites integrate smoothly with social media in order to maximize your clinic’s social reach.
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