Facebook Study Validates Need for Constant Quality Interaction

Importance of Reaching Out to Your Patients on Facebook

The study above comes from comScore, Inc., and reveals the share of time users spend on various activities on Facebook. As you can see, the greatest amount of time is spent on a user’s homepage or news feed. With more than 700 billion monthly minutes spent on the social network, the news feed presents a direct line of communication to your patients.

However, communication is a two-way street. You can’t expect patients to come to your Facebook page and participate in the conversation if you aren’t offering something intriguing to pique their interest and inspire interaction. To bring patients into your social media community, reach out to them by consistently posting to your page, which will keep you in their news feeds. Doing so is essential to the continued growth of your Facebook fan base.

3 Ways to Stay in Your Patients’ Facebook News Feed

First, provide updates concerning your practice. Do you have a continuing education course coming up? Have you recently attended an industry conference or adopted a new type of technology? Are you volunteering your time and expertise to a cause you support? Have you recently reach a significant milestone? Start by keeping your patients up-to-date on the current events of your practice.

Second, express your passion for the work you perform. Are you excited about a new procedure? Did you recently read an article that interested you? Express your thoughts and opinions as you would in-office. As more and more patients turn to the internet, and social media specifically, when considering medical procedures, they want to get to know a doctor and his team before making the appointment for their consultation.

Last, listen and respond. Not many people enjoy talking to themselves. Your patients are asking questions and posting comments because you have generated some amount of interest in them, and they have an opinion they would not only like to express, but would also like some feedback on. Don’t allow this interest to deflate. The more consistently you respond to your patients, the more they will return and contribute to the conversation on Facebook.