Master Your Social Media Strategy: Top Tips for Chiropractors | Podcast Ep. 242

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we are talking social media and chiropractic. We're going to break down some really important things that you need to know for your practice, including the two most important components of activating social media for your practice. Some of the pitfalls to avoid, some of the metrics you should look at, some maybe you shouldn't be be so concerned with all that and more on today's episode. Additionally, I have dropped in the episode show notes a direct link. We recently released a social media strategy guide. We're going to call it the ultimate Chiropractic social media Strategy Guide. You can pick that up for free. It outlines everything we're going to talk about today and much more. Also, you can reference back to it. Be sure to pick that up by using the link in the show notes. Before we get started, I will ask you if you have not left a rating or review for this podcast, please, please do so. It helps more and more docs find out about the podcast and it's just a really cool thing to do. So if you like what you've been hearing, if you've been paying attention and listening and tuning in, please scroll down. If you're listening on an iPhone, tap the number of stars that you think we deserve. If you have any questions, as always, you can hit me up@jefeevidencebasedchiropractor.com but as promised, today's episode let's talk social media. What do you need to know, what don't you need to know and what should you be concerned? So social media with chiropractic, two big components, the most important components, and we've learned this throughout, posting for hundreds of docs over multiple years and reaching millions of people. It comes down to two things, engagement and conversion. I'll say that one more time. Engagement and conversion. Now, if we're talking about Facebook specifically with engagement, that means likes, comments and shares. It's ultimately what Facebook defines as engagement. Again, likes how many people liked the post that you put up, the video that you put up, whatever you might have put up. How many likes did you get, how many comments did you get and how many shares did you get? That is engagement. That's one critically important component of any social media strategy is maximizing engagement. One huge tip there, pro tip, smart tip, however you want to define it, please comment if somebody comments on your post. If they engage, type back a comment for every single comment. That helps get you more total comments. It also helps drive further engagement. Somebody wants to start a conversation with you, you put out something, they think it's awesome, and you leave them hanging. It's like, you know, leaving them hanging. It does not feel good. So one tip. Absolutely. Make sure somebody on your team is. Is recommenting or responding, I guess I should say, to every comment that happens on your page, super, super important. That's engagement in a nutshell. The other side of this equation is conversion. What do we mean by conversion? Conversion just really means an action step. So not every post that you put out is gonna result in a conversion to a new patient in your practice. It's unrealistic. But conversion could mean a call to your office. It could mean a conversion to direct them to your blog. So they've clicked off of Facebook, they've converted it to an action step that you've defined. In marketing lingo, a lot of times we call that the call to action. So your call to action on your post is really important. Your call to action might be to stimulate engagement. You know, comment down below. Be sure to share this with a friend. Let us know what you think about this. What's your favorite insert? Whatever the topic is here. Right? So that is conversion in a nutshell. Conversion and engagement are really the two primary components of any really successful dynamic social media campaign for docs. And again, we've learned this throughout multiple years with the smart chiropractor posting for hundreds of docs, tens of thousands of posts reaching millions of people. These are the two holy grail items. Now I also want to give a caveat here. And this ties into some key performance indicators and metrics that we'll talk about later on. But don't get too crazy with the data meaning engagement and conversion. We just broke them down to the two most important things. But if you see some of your posts going out there and you're not getting a quote unquote ton of engagement, maybe you're getting a like or two. Maybe you're getting a comment or two every now and again. Don't be discouraged as you build up. You need to let people understand and teach them to learn from you, I guess is one way to put about. So teach them to learn from you. The first post that you put out, it's very unlikely it's going to catch fire. They need to know that you're going to be there consistently. They need to know that you're going to consistently ask for engagement and really target good calls to action. That takes time to build up. So don't get overly concerned. You want to keep an eye on engagement, conversion. Those are the two things. But don't get overly concerned if your page only has a couple hundred people following it. Like many docs, don't stress out. If you get a couple likes, that's a great positive step. Don't overreact to the fact that you might not be seeing as much engagement. The second component to it is you have to also remember only a small percentage of the people who see your post are going to engage. That doesn't matter if you're a page that has millions and millions of followers who might get thousands of engagements, but that's still a small percentage of the overall number of people who follow that page. So you have to take these things in. You have to compare them apples to apples. Whereas if you have a couple hundred people, a like or two and a share or two, that's great. So keep those things in mind when you think about your engagement and conversion. A couple other things that I think are really, really important is following a format now within the smart chiropractor, we call this Teach and invite consistently. This is also said in Gary Vaynerchuk's world as jab, jab, jab, right hook, you know, deliver value, deliver value, deliver value and then ask. That's the key component here. So teach and invite consistently is sort of how we define that within chiropractic. Teach is the jab, invite is the ask, and consistently is what you need to do. There's so many docs out there, we always say it. Docs struggle with two primary things. You're probably going to shake your head at one of these two content and consistency. Some docs have great content, but they're inconsistent. Many don't know where to start with content and they're inconsistent. And that's like a kind of a double whammy. So. So we wanna solve both of those things with the smart chiropractor, but take home. Message for you listening to this podcast is we go through the lens of teach and invite consistently. Teach something. Engage, entertain, provide value, educate. Right, teach. Nature of Dr. Educator, teacher. Right. So teach something, then invite. Invite is that call to action? What would you like them to do? What's the next step? Is it to comment down below? Is it to shoot you an email? Is it to leave a review? Is it to give you a call at the office? You can have that invitation, which basically is the call to action. Do a variety of different things, then you need to do it Consistently, right? Teach an invite consistently. If you're doing it inconsistently, you are likely to get less than consistent results. It sounds obvious, but these things build upon each other. Meaning if you are inconsistent, then it's not a one plus one equals two phenomenon. If you are consistent, you. You can start amplifying the opportunity to convert and engage. When you are consistent, people know what to expect. They know you're gonna be there, you've taught them to learn from you, and they will continue to engage and convert at a higher rate the more consistent you are with your posting, especially if you're doing it in a teacher interval. You can't just go on all the time and ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, or sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. It falls on deaf ears. It's not best practices and it's just kind of cheesy and corny. So teach and invite consistently. Hopefully that should be like a real jewel for you and a real piece of gold to get out there and stimulate your social efforts. Always think about it through the lens of, am I teaching something now? I once I've done that, I've now afforded myself the opportunity to invite them to do something else. Whether that's a call to action of again, comment down below, like share, give us a call and then I'm gonna do that consistently. When you can start to put those things into action, you start to see real results without any ad spend whatsoever, but you start to see real results from your social media. Now when we talk social media, there are three major players. There's Facebook, there's Instagram, and there's YouTube. Yeah, TikTok's coming up super quick, but there's a lot I think still to be learned there. So if you're inexperienced, if you've mastered Facebook, you've mastered Instagram, you mastered YouTube, you're one of that.01%. Yeah, you could explore TikTok, have some fun over there, but if you haven't mastered Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, then you're definitely gonna wanna start there. Those are your three primary channels. YouTube is owned by Google. It is the second most popular search engine in the world. The most popular is Google, so they're one in the same. And then Facebook owns Instagram, Right? So it's basically two primary platforms here, but they do have a little bit of nuance difference in terms of how people consume content. What the true purpose is, the format, the cadence, the paid opportunities, and also the reporting metrics. Those are a little bit different depending upon each platform. Now if you pick up our social Media strategy guide. I'm gonna again enc hit up the show notes. Here we break down those consumption, the purpose, the format, the cadence, the paid opportunities and reporting for each of those platforms. You can check that out in a graph and a chart which really helps clarify which platform is best for you or which direction you want to go. Pick that up in the social media guide. That will make things really easy for you. Now the next component of all this is really distributing content. So there's really three types of primary content distribution. There's paid distribution, right? Advertising, essentially print, radio, tv, banner ads, retargeting, you name it. There's paid. You paid to get the traffic. You paid to have your name in front of people. These are very valuable thing, but that should be a small portion of your overall distribution and marketing. Not all of it. For so many docs out there, you know, like we do Facebook, we do Facebook ads, but then there's a crickets on their page. Man, you are just missing a ton of opportunity if you're running discounted ads and you're not leading with fantastic content and retargeting where many times you don't need to do those discounts. So you not only gain additional money by not doing the discount, you have better positioning for your practice goes all the way around. But paid distribution is one aspect of it. Second piece of distribution is owned distribution. Owned distribution are those channels that you own. Pretty self explanatory. This could be your website, your blog, maybe it's the social media. Yes, you're kind of on rented land on social media, but you're controlling the message, right? So you kind of own the message on that platform. Paid distribution, you're paying for it. Basically ads, own distribution, you want to have a lot of time that should be like 80% of where your stuff happens is through your own distribution. And then there's the third tier which is earned. This is the holy grail. Earned distribution is when people share it, mention it, it's referrals, reviews, it's word of mouth. Earned distribution is like the cherry on top. It's the icing on the cake because you have earned it. You put out quality content. People love your service, they love what you're talking about and they are sharing and amplifying your message without you having to pay for it. Right? But to get the earned distribution, you have to start on the owned. You have to be able to put out that content that people want to share. You have to put out the information that individuals are mentioning that they are referring other People to that they are commenting and engaging and converting on. So it all starts with own distribution. I'm going to encourage you to spend 75 to 80% minimum of what you're doing on that sort of thing. Now again, big two things that docs struggle with is the consistency and the content. If you need help with either of those, then check out the smart chiropractor. We take care of all that automatic marketing. We're going to do all the content marketing for your practice. You can edit any of it. You can salt it to taste, so to speak. It's awesome program. I won't go into it in too much detail but check that out. But own distribution, bottom line, you need to be doing that. So then you layer on the paid distribution based upon what you learn, right? What are people engaging with? What are people jazzed and psyched about? Now you're not forcing things down their throat, but you're reacting and retargeting to the information that people are already engaging and converting on. This helps you get lower prices on your click through rates. It helps you get further amplification in the algorithms. These things are super, super super important. So let's break down a couple things of avoiding these traps. I want to talk about a couple of things that we said at the very top of this to avoid as you get into stuff. You know, new channel, you know fomo. Don't have fear of missing out. Don't have FOMO all the time. You know TikTok, vine, back in the day, Snapchat. There's a new channel each and every day. Don't stress out. Focus on your core channels. Do you have Facebook good? Do you have Instagram good? Do you have YouTube good? At least pick one of those to really lock up before you start expanding into the channels that haven't proven themselves yet. So no channel fomo. Focus. Get strategic on a channel. Second piece, Vanity metrics. Chiropractors love vanity metrics. But don't stress out. Yes, it makes you feel good when you have a ton of engagement. But remember, engagement is going to be directly proportional to your page size. If your page size is under a few thousand followers, it's not going to be hundreds of likes, comments and shares. Even a handful means you are in the right direction. So don't stress out and don't get all crazy. Sometimes I feel like chiropractors, you know, they get crazy on like posting and hashtag like what am I doing for best times to post? Should I post at 2pm or 3pm? Post something and get started. If you haven't gotten started yet, the most important thing is to have great content and put it out consistently. Now, clearly you don't want to put stuff out at 3am Typically, right? But the difference between whether you post something at 2pm or 2:30pm very rarely makes a significant difference until you're in the optimization phase of what you're doing, not the building phase. So if you are a beginner, if you're getting out there, if you're trying to build and grow your page, if you're less than a few thousand people following your page, worry more about great content, worry more about staying consistent than you do about the specific minute of the day that you make the post. So those are a couple of things. Additionally, if you pick up the Social Media Strategy Guide, I've outlaid a couple content tools that I think are great buzzsumo canva hootsuite tools that you can utilize to help create content. We've hyperlinked those so you can check that out and again, if you want with this, if this makes sense to you, if you believe in teach and invite consistently, if you believe in leading with value instead of leading with discounts, then check out what we have going on@the smartchiropractor.com if you have any questions about it whatsoever, hit me up jeff@the evidence basedchiropractor.com I look forward to talking with you next week. Make it a great week in practice and I will talk to you soon. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.