Do you find yourself scratching your head when trying to figure out which social media platforms to use in marketing your practice? Do you find yourself wondering if the one you’re using is the right one? If so, please read on because this blog post is for you.
What Platforms Do Your Clients Use?
This is probably the best question to ask yourself in trying to figure out which ones to choose for your practice. The most obvious ones are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Linkedin. Some research on your part to find the answer to this question could pay off immensely before you decide to devote your time to establish a presence for your practice on either one of these three.
In my case, my clients are predominantly guys, so I know I’m probably not focusing on Pinterest since many of those who visit this site are females. I’m not trying to stereotype anybody by saying this, but that is at least my sense of who tends to traffic this platform. What I considered is which of the various platforms get the most traffic: YouTube is the most used at this point in time. I have made a conscious effort to maintain a presence on YouTube because I do Facebook Live videos for my practice and I will try to save these to my computer and repurpose them as YouTube videos. YouTube also has a live video option you may want to consider as well.
What To Do Once You Pick Your Social Media Platform(s)
So let’s say you pick Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for your platforms. These are the most heavily used of the major ones, and the ones I use for my practice. Posting every day on Facebook is most desirable for this platform, or at least posting on a regular basis. I try to post a couple of times a week on Facebook. One of the primary focuses of social media posts is to drive traffic to your website, particularly blog posts that you make on your website. This is discussed in another post by Priscilla Rodriquez. Once you make a new blog post, you can make a Facebook post about it, and be sure to encourage your Facebook followers to repost this for others if they think it will be helpful. You can also boost your posts if you decide that this will help get you more clients.
Doing Facebook lives can be another good way to engage with your followers. Joe Sanok discussed this in one of his Q & A’s. If you have a topic you do a blog post on, you can do a Facebook live on it, then take the Facebook live video and embed it on the site of the blog post. This will help increase your SEO, as well as help to lead more traffic to your website, and hopefully generate more business for you in the form of new clients. Be aware that you can set up separate Facebook accounts for business to avoid dual relationships with those clients that invite you to friend them, which is out of the question for me as a social worker.
How to Work YouTube and Twitter
You can set up your own YouTube channel and either record and post videos to that, or do YouTube lives to help gain exposure to potential clients that would like to work with you. The beauty of doing live videos, or videos at all for that matter, is that your potential clients can get an idea about what it would be like to work with you simply by watching your videos. Be aware you can repurpose Facebook lives as YouTube videos if you save them to your phone or download them to your computer and can later upload them to YouTube as videos to your channel. If you are on Twitter, follow those who are relevant to your business and make posts that tie into how you help your ideal clients so they are more apt to reach out to you and become new clients. Whichever one or more you choose, best of luck in generating engagement and business for your practice as well!
Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW is a private practice therapist in Austin, Texas. He has an extensive background in working with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder at a clinic for older adults with these disorders in Austin. Scott now works with adults and adolescents 14 and up in private practice. He is also the author of the new e-book Life’s Lessons from the Young and the Old on Amazon.
