Your Guide to Setting Up, Maintaining, and Growing Your Imaging Center’s Radiology Facebook Page
While most businesses now have a facebook page, radiology Facebook pages for imaging centers are less common than others. Even in the Medical industry, Facebook is a powerful tool for any practice.
In this article, we will discuss the “who, what, when, where and why” of using Facebook to promote awareness of and engagement with your imaging center.
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Getting Started: How to Market Your Imaging Center on Facebook
Radiology social media outreach is complex due to the nature of their business. However, Facebook is the most popular social media site worldwide. Its position in the market means it has the broadest reach across all demographics. It also provides some of the most powerful user tracking tools available to marketers.
With a Facebook page, your imaging center can reach any demographic and also collect valuable data on real users to inform all your marketing initiatives, including market segmentation strategy. These things and more make Facebook the best place to start your radiology social media presence.
What to do With Your Diagnostics Facebook Page
1. Who? Market to referring doctors and patients in the same place at the same time.
Traditionally, the marketing approach for most imaging centers has focused on referring doctors while excluding patients. This made the most sense from a numbers-to-dollars perspective in the past, but that was before the rise of social media. On your radiology Facebook page, your practice can market to both groups at once.
For targeting patients, your posts should center on the human element of your practice, demonstrating an intimate level of care in your organization and the patient benefits you offer. According to Ragan’s Health Care Communication News, referring physicians spend 60% of their time on social media reading, sharing, and discussing healthcare news. So, focus your physician-targeted posts on sharing both your expertise and what’s going on in the world of diagnostics. The best approach is an all-inclusive one in which you post content frequently in a well-mapped flow of how and when to target all your market segments and their overlapping interests.
2. What: Broadcast all your cool technology (machines and images) for an easy eyeball magnet.
You’ve probably heard the term “eyeball economy,” which refers to the effect social media, SEO, and the science of web traffic have had on businesses and how they find new customers. Essentially, if you can get the eyeballs, the dollars will follow. So, lean on your strengths.
Radiology imaging centers have some of today’s coolest and most expensive machines that the public have personal access too. Broadcasting information about the impressive tech in your center(s), and sharing the images, GIFs, and videos these machines produce, are two great ways to get and keep eyeballs on your diagnostics facebook page. Whether this is a fMRI of the brain, contrast-enhanced images of the body, or cardiac imaging of a pulsating heart muscle, use the tech at your disposal to your advantage!
3. When: Frequently.
While your radiology Facebook page is not a personal one and you should avoid over-sharing, your imaging practice should post to its Facebook page at least once a week and not more than once per day. Ideally, you will set a schedule and queue up unique content for publishing at the same time on the same day each week, then fill in the days between with interesting and relevant “shares,” or repurposed content. Creating that much original content is a lot of work, so make sure you have a dedicated resource to allocate to your diagnostics center social media presence.
You can use an auto-posting system like Buffer to queue up your posts for set-it-and-forget-it simplicity.
4. Where: Cross-promote your content everywhere.
Because of its broad reach, Facebook should serve as the center for your content cross-promotion across all outreach channels. Link back to your practice’s main site as much as possible, and once you are an imaging center Facebook expert, branch out into other channels and begin driving traffic there as well. The goal is to whip up a cyclone-esque flow of traffic between all your social media outreach channels, your website, and all your followers.
Bear in mind that learning web traffic science and digital marketing is required to create a strong feedback loop that will make all your effort worthwhile. Either dedicate the time required and stick with it until your investment pays off, or reach out to an expert for help.
5. Why: All these reasons, and then some.
- Your Facebook page can teach you more about what patients and referring doctors want. With special tools just for marketers, your imaging practice can track the online behavior of those “Like” your page.
- A Facebook page gives you a chance to make lasting, human connections with referring doctors and their patients. Just as much as we are in an eyeball economy, we are also living in a relationship-based economy. Engaging with patients, referring doctors, and prospects in a personal way will draw them in and keep them close.
- Facebook is good for search engine optimization (SEO). A Facebook page is a great tool for your radiology social media strategy to increase the visibility of your website and your branded content. While creating a strong flow of traffic requires a well-planned engagement funnel, any level of cross-promotion is helpful.
- Your competition may already have a Facebook page. This point speaks for itself. Unfortunately, “everybody’s doing it” does apply to this scenario.
Creating an engaged, active following for your diagnostics Facebook page is a lofty, albeit important, goal. In conjunction with an active and relevant blog on your practice’s website, this is the first step to digital marketing for your radiology practice in the social media realm. Once your practice achieves this, you can move on to image-based social platforms like Instagram, which has an increasingly broad reach across many demographics.
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