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Using the Internet in your practice. Part 2: Generating new patients using social media

OBG Management. 2014 April;26(4):36–39
March 28, 2014|OBG Management
Ron Romano;Neil H. Baum, MD
Author and Disclosure Information

Ron Romano is President of www.YourInternetDoctor.com and CEO of Instant Marketing Systems. He co-authored The Internet Survival Guide for Doctors (2014, Instant Marketing Systems) and No B.S. Direct Marketing (2006, Entrepreneur Press) and contributed to the Walking with the Wise series (2004, Mentors Publishing). He is an Internet marketing consultant, speaker, and creator of “The Implementation Blueprint System.”

Neil H. Baum, MD, practices urology in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Urology at Tulane Medical School and Louisiana State University School of Medicine, both in New Orleans. He is also on the medical staff at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, and East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie, Louisiana. He is the author of Social Media for the Healthcare Professional (2012, Greenbranch) and Marketing Your Clinical Practice: Ethically, Effectively, Economically (4th edition, 2009; Jones & Bartlett).

The authors report no financial relationships relevant to this article.

While no one denies the usefulness of social media, very few medical practices know exactly how to harness its power. Here, we focus on the top three social media heavyweights: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

THE SERIES: USING THE INTERNET IN YOUR PRACTICE

Part 1: Why social media are important and how to get started (February 2014)

Part 3: Search engine optimization

Part 4: Online reputation management

(Look for Parts 3 and 4 in 2014)

Can Facebook generate new patients?
You and your practice certainly can place a lot of information and pictures on Facebook, and potential patients can leave comments or ask questions easily. You can start a dialog with a patient without providing medical advice and motivate her to see that you are providing medical value before the doctor–patient relationship is established. Still, does a Facebook page generate new patients? It depends on the information you post and how you use Facebook to acquire new patients.

For instance, your practice is probably restricted to a local area—a few zip codes surrounding your office and hospital—which means you really only want patients who are in your area to visit your practice’s Facebook page because those are the only ones who are likely to call and make an appointment. Unless you are highly specialized in a particular field, such as fistula repair, robotic surgery, or the treatment of mesh complications, the Facebook surfer from New York isn’t likely to hop on a plane to come to your practice on the West Coast for gynecologic or obstetric care.

Related article: Four pillars of a successful practice: 2. Attract new patients Neal H. Baum, MD (Practice Management, May 2013)

On the surface, it appears that it is impossible to compete with larger practices and hospitals that have more dedicated staff to draw prospective patients to a practice through Facebook. However, the real, overarching challenge is to improve your Web site rankings on the major search engines, to be on the first page of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search results. And what we do know is that Google has placed a high value on Web site rankings through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—that is, of course, as long as your Facebook page provides content that has keywords relevant to your target market and the content on your page links back to your Web site.

Therefore, it is not necessary to devote an inordinate amount of time to your social media presence to obtain results. You will, on the other hand, get more visitors to your Web site if it is found on the first page of search engine results because of your Facebook posts. Of course, if your Web site is not set up properly for easy visitor navigation and visitor conversion, you may not be able to obtain the desired result of gaining new patients even if they do find your site. You need to have a Web site with marketing and patient conversion systems built into it; don’t overlook the layout of your Web site. For more on this issue, see Part 1 of this series.

Related article: Using the Internet in your practice. Part 1: Why social media are important and how to get started Neal H. Baum, MD, and Ron Romano (Practice Management, February 2014)

YOUTUBE VIDEOS AND YOUR PRACTICE
YouTube has become a significant search engine for virtually every product and service you offer your patients. There are millions of videos on YouTube, and you can search topics simply by typing in any topic that your patients might be interested in, from birth control to cancer.

There are five ways your practice can benefit from a video posted on YouTube:

  1. Web site traffic driver. To achieve this “pull,” you must label your posted video correctly, with keyword phrases that are relevant to the type of patient or conditions you are looking for, and offer a description that would make a viewer want to see the video. You also must provide a link back to your Web site, which increases your chances of gaining a new patient from YouTube.
  2. Boost your search engine optimization. Google places a high-ranking factor on videos posted to YouTube that are keyword-relevant.
  3. A video library can position you as an expert in the field. You can create your own YouTube channel and keep adding videos. One of us (NHB) has more than
    70 medical videos on his YouTube channel. If someone views one of these videos, they will have immediate access to the rest of the video collection even though they may be labelled with other keywords. This further positions you as the knowledgeable expert in your field.
  4. Video embedding capability. Any video you have posted to YouTube can be placed on your Web site, in a format that keeps the viewer on your site. This means the viewer has less of a chance of getting distracted with other video offerings and landing on someone else’s Web site.
  5. Free video storage. Because you have stored the video on YouTube, you are not using the resources on your Web site when someone, or several people, view the video at the same time.

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