There are many reasons to utilize social media as part of your chiropractic marketing strategy. The two main reasons: patient retention and more patient referrals. We all know that it is important to keep the patients you already have coming back and that there is no greater compliment than a patient referring his/her friends and family members.
In the past, patient retention and referral programs involved expensive mailers reminding patients of your services and letting them know about your patient referral incentives. You may have even had a staff member who was in charge of patient reactivation and spent hours on end calling patients you hadn’t seen in a while. But who has the time or money for that?
Chiropractic Patient Retention Made Easy
Social media is a great way to reach your patients where they already spend a lot of their time. Encourage your current patients to follow your social media accounts by sending out an email and putting up a small sign in your front office.
Then, post regular updates to stay top-of-mind. In fact, just your presence in your patients’ news feeds is enough to subtly remind them that they should make an appointment!
If you can grow your following and announce new services on Facebook, you can gradually reduce your spending on mailers and other initiatives. You may even decide to move that budget to social media and run ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Patient Referrals from Social Media
Social media is a great outlet for generating patient referrals. Before social media, your patients would have had to pick up the phone and call their friend to tell them about you, or perhaps run into someone at the exact time they were in need of chiropractic services in order to refer them to your practice. Social media sites like Facebook, however, are now making that process easier than ever!
Let’s take a look at a couple of common scenarios to see just how social media can lead to more referrals:
Scenario #1
Susie slipped on some ice last week and her back has been hurting her ever since. She posts something about it on Facebook and her friend Mary, who happens to be your happy patient, sees it. Mary can now easily comment back to Susie about the wonderful chiropractor that she should go see! If your practice has a Facebook page, Mary can link right to it in her comment so that Susie can find your practice website and contact information with one click.
Scenario #2
You post a trivia question on your practice Facebook page. Your patient Jonathan comments with his answer. When Jonathan comments, many of his friends will see a notification in their news feeds that Jonathan Doe commented on XX Chiropractor’s post. Jonathan’s friend, Mike, has been looking for a new chiropractor and when he sees this notification, he clicks onto your Facebook page.
It’s Time to Be Social!
If your current patient retention/reactivation strategy isn’t working, or you’re looking for new ways to generate patient referrals, it is probably time to build your practice’s presence on social media.