Social Speak Archives | Social Speak Network

Growth Prompts, Social Media, Social Media, Social Speak

How to Build Your Followers on Social Media

Today we are going to talk about growing followers organically on social media. This is something that our clients ask all the time: “How do I increase my followers? How do I increase my followers?” And you can do it organically. We’re gonna talk about Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn company pages today, okay so we have a lot to cover.

Twitter

With your Twitter account, you need to make sure you are tweeting consistently. So whatever that schedule is, make sure you’re sticking to it. Maybe it’s one time a day, two times a day, three times a day. Optimize your posting time, so try different times. Thinking of your ideal client or patient, when are they home? Usually, Twitter’s always done by your mobile device, so most likely they’re on Twitter from their phone, so think of lunches, break times, maybe if your patients are parents, maybe later in the evening. Get creative with that posting time. It doesn’t always have to be 9:00 to 5:00. It could be at 6:00 AM, it could be 9:00 PM. So playing around with those posting times and seeing where, what times, and what days you’re getting the most engagement. You may be thinking, okay because you’re open Monday through Friday that that’s when you need to post, but maybe doing weekend posts is a great idea as well.

Post visual content. So Twitter used to be just all text. It doesn’t have to be now. Upload images, upload videos, make it eye-appealing, and utilize hashtags. We will put in the description below different hashtag tools to help you, but Twitter and Instagram, even LinkedIn, they thrive off of those hashtags, and you can follow different hashtags. People are always searching certain hashtags, and those are the people they follow. So look for those hashtags, follow the people that are utilizing those hashtags, make sure that you are Retweeting. So have a list of people in your industry that are like-minded. Not necessarily competition, but maybe it’s news articles. So if you are a OB-GYN, you may wanna look at the Women’s Health Magazine and Retweet stories that they’re posting. Look at those resources and make sure that you are utilizing those Retweets because then their audience will start to see you as well.

One great thing with all social media is that famous little search button on every single social media platform, whether it’s in the right-hand corner or in the middle, up top. Usually, it’s always up top. With Instagram, there’s a search icon when you open up the mobile app and search for certain people. If you are looking for… If your office is only within a 25-mile radius in that location, search for people in that location. Start following more people, and set a goal to maybe follow 20 people per week. One thing with all platforms and this is just a personal preference, but when you’re following people, don’t go follower happy, okay, and what I mean by that is you’ll look at some accounts and they’ll say they’re following 1000 people, but they only have 60 followers. Well, that ratio, it just seems kind of spammy, so when you start growing your followers, follow people, but do ’em in low numbers. So follow maybe five a day, 20 per week. Figure out what that looks like and make sure that those people are following you back. The more people that you follow that are in your niche, in your target market, they’re more likely to follow you back. Okay. So those are just a few tips for Twitter.

Instagram

Let’s go into Instagram. So again, you’ll see these… The same tips are, again, staying consistent, making sure that you’re posting at least once a day on Instagram, utilizing different content, trying live videos, doing Instagram stories, doing Instagram TV, along with just your regular posts. Share content from other users. So it’s user-generated content, so mentioning them, “This is a great article or a great story from so-and-so,” and make sure that you are collaborating with others. So thinking of your referral partners, is there a way where you guys can share a post every week or a couple of posts per month? How can you work with your referral partners on a much bigger scale to be able to help grow each other’s social media? Look at your analytics. Find out… Instagram does a great job with letting you know who’s looking at your posts, what days are your best days and what times, and then also your demographics. So where are they at, are they male, female, what stories are getting the most engagement? So paying attention to your analytics so you can make sure you’re giving that content back to them and that they are engaging with it.

Engage with your fans. Every follower you have… And again, you can search for your target market and follow them, engage with them, take the time to like their posts, to comment on them. Also look at those resources, those same people that you are gonna be retweeting on Twitter or sharing stories on Facebook, look at what they’re posting and start commenting on it because if they are a resource that you like, again, if it’s Women’s Health Magazine, and you start commenting on their stuff on Instagram, their followers are gonna see those comments as well. So being active and engaging with these platforms is a great way to be able to increase your followers. Again, it takes time. It’s not gonna be an overnight success by any means, but to have somebody that’s dedicated to your social media to make sure that they are reaching those correct people, that is key.

Facebook

Facebook, you can always invite your friends to like your page. So that’s always a great starting point. And then really with Facebook having your icon on, and all your social media icons and your email signature, having a sign at the front desk, follow us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, you know, because each person is gonna have that social media platform that they like, and they trust, and that’s kind of their go-to. So giving them the option of where they wanna follow you and engage with you as great.

So being able to put those signs up there, you know, on your marketing materials, but then with Facebook, working on having a little bit of ad spend, and you’ll see with especially with LinkedIn, as we get into that, you know, running those targeted ads, and having like campaigns following, follow our campaigns running, that’s where we’ve been able to see the most growth with our clients. And again, this is a paid feature, this isn’t an organic feature.

Start by inviting your friends and family to like your page. You’re always gonna have more friends because that’s where you most likely started doing Facebook was having a personal profile, and then you created your business page. So you could also have your employees of your company, also invite people to like the Facebook page. So consistency, inviting and then working on some of the paid options of boosting and running a paid like campaign to reach your target market.

Going into LinkedIn, so you have your LinkedIn profile, and LinkedIn company pages are really growing. LinkedIn, what they’re doing with their platform I mean, it’s huge. And it’s a great b2b tool. So again, thinking of those referral partners, and inviting them to like the page, inviting your contacts to like your page, adding your employees to your page. And so they can say, “Okay, but it’s not just this one person, but they have a whole team and what their roles are.

Then for them to share the page to their personal profile, and for them to invite their contacts to like that page. So that process is really important too, is really to get your employees involved with your LinkedIn company page. And so that’s a great way to grow your followers organically with LinkedIn, you know, utilizing LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups as well, finding those targeted groups, being able to… Now with Facebook, you can share your content from your business page into a group, which is awesome. With LinkedIn, you can’t, but you can still post and be able to mention the company page.

Utilizing those LinkedIn groups, inviting your connections to like, following the page, and sharing your content from the company page to your personal profile, as well, is a great way to grow those followers organically.

YouTube

So last but not least, is YouTube. YouTube is a little bit different. It’s not so much of a social media platform, as it is more of a search engine. And really, that’s what it is. It is a video search engine. Google owns YouTube. So having videos on there is great for your SEO as well.

A few things to help your channel be found and to increase those subscribers to your channel is making sure you’re utilizing playlists and that they’re clear. So when people go there, they can see what type, what categories, and that’s really what the playlists are, they are categories that you have of different videos. Publishing longer videos, so having a mix between short tips, you know those three to five-minute videos, and then the longer ones that are 10 plus minutes that are really educating your audience on certain topics.

You know, maybe again, I always like to use the OB-GYN’s example, you know, maybe you’re talking about a eating plan for a pregnant woman or a birth plan or certain tips. These videos can be longer because they’re going to be educational. Maybe you’ll put together a PowerPoint presentation, and you’re walking through that as you’re talking. So publishing 10-plus minute videos is a great way to increase your subscribers.

Promoting your videos on an end-screen. Using those options that YouTube gives you, it will say end screen, you can say subscribe to our channel there, it will also allow you to promote your… Like another playlist, or if you’re doing a video that’s specific to that playlist, you want them to stay in that loop of that playlist. And so utilizing those tools to be able to do that.

Reply to every comment, if you get comments, and a lot of them, not a lot of them, but some of them can be spam. And just, you know, like it, but reply to the comments that need to be… That need to have a reply because those are gonna be the people that are gonna subscribe to your channel. Another one is just making sure your channel’s optimized completely. So having a tagline with your channel, making sure you have your channel app up top, and it’s clear and that they can… YouTube does this where it will show you what it’s gonna look like on a computer, on a TV because smart TVs people are watching YouTube all the time from their TV, and then what it’s gonna look like on their mobile device.

So you wanna make sure that that header is clear so when they come to it, it’s not cut off on every device that they are watching your videos from. They know exactly who it is. Making sure that you have a clear description, that your contact information, your website is in there, so they can reach you if they need to from your channel, but then also each video making sure you have that clear description, that keyword friendly title, the tag words, you know, making sure you have a YouTube thumbnail.

Just going through that little checklist to make sure everything is filled out correctly with your channel and your videos. Then also when you’re doing these videos, we always take our video and we put it onto YouTube and then we take the code from YouTube and we embed our videos into our blog post, which is a great way to get viewers to watch your videos, promote them on social media, have a video within your email signature, use them in your newsletters, people love listening and watching videos. So being able to utilize them in multiple places and having them link back to YouTube is a great way to be able to grow your subscribers.

I know we covered a lot today, if you need help putting together this strategy, this… And again, what we talked about today was really looking at that organic growth. You can run ads on all of these platforms to increase your followers and that we do help our clients with both the organic growth and the paid growth to make sure that you’re reaching your target market. If you need help with that and would like to talk more about the increasing your followers on all these platforms, head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and click on free consultation.

Schedule your 30-minute free consultation today.

October 28, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Blogging, Content Creation, Social Speak

Use Zapier to Create Blog Post from New Video on YouTube

Today’s blog discusses the quick, easy, and simple processes that we use in order to repurpose the videos that you’re creating for social media. We’ve been discussing how important it is for your medical practice, your wellness center, to be doing videos as a way to stand out online and really create that personal relationship with your target audience and with those prospective patients. However, we then take the video and we recommend utilizing it in a lot of different ways.

One such way is by taking the transcript and turning it into a blog post. So this requires you to upload the video to YouTube, get the embed code, paste the embed code into a blog post, then create the description, put that into the blog post, and then grab the transcript of this after you upload it to a place like Scribie, for example, and put that into the blog post as well.

To simplify this process, we utilize Zapier.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is a communication tool between YouTube and your blog. And we use it for a lot of other systems and processes as well, where if you have something repetitive that you’re always doing over and over again.

There are hundreds of other platforms like it, can connect those two items that you’re just copying and pasting and make it, so it’s a really easy flow from one to the other.

How to use Zapier

So let’s jump in, and I will share my screen. So what we’re going to see first here is Zapier. I already have the dashboard set up.

Make a zap

Start by clicking, “Make a Zap.” Every video that we create, we wanna make sure that we’re sharing it to social media. So on our backend, every single video that gets uploaded to YouTube then also gets posted to our Basecamp work. But I do not have it set up where it also creates the video blog post.

So what we’re going do is YouTube, and you can always search for that as well. And I’m going to click, “A New Video to a Channel.” And then we can click, “Continue.” And so we already have our YouTube account hooked up here, but if we didn’t, then we would go through the process of linking it up.

Log in on your account

Now, for Zapier as well as any other time that you’re linking two different pieces of software online, I just recommend logging into those accounts beforehand, making sure you’re in the right account, and then going through the process of trying to sync that. One of the reasons why I do that is because you might be in your personal account rather than the company account, for example, and you don’t wanna link up your personal stuff with the company stuff. You might as well just make sure from the very beginning.

Get the channel ID

So here, we need to get the channel ID. You could also do, “Upload a Video to a Username.” However, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what the username is, but the channel ID is very simple to find.

So I am going to just click this button right here. So I already clicked to upload a video, but the channel ID is just this next one after this channels here. Oops. We’ll click, “Continue.” And then I always recommend testing this trigger, so fingers crossed it worked. Awesome. So our last video that we did is, “Five Content Marketing Ideas for Healthcare Practices.” This was our blog post last week. And look at this, it pulls in the description, when it was published as well as the thumbnails. So that is really cool that it also does the thumbnails because we’re going to be using that for our featured image down the road here. Okay. So what we have is, when this happens, so when a new video is uploaded to the channel on YouTube, we do this.

And so here we want to do WordPress, and we want to create a post. Okay, we’ll click, “Continue,” and we want the WordPress that we already have connected. But, again, you’d wanna make sure you’re logged in here, and it will just prompt you through the steps, so making sure that you have access and you’re giving Zapier the access to that account.

Create a post

So what I wanna do is create a post. However, you could also do pages, media, forums, etcetera, products, pop-ups, whatever you have there. We wanna do a post for this part. The title is the title of the video. And you could also do… If you want to, you could put video in the title there or you could put “From the Wellness video channel” or something. I don’t know, whatever you want to put there. I’m just going to put the title just to keep it simple. The featured media. So here, we might have to play around with it just a little bit to make sure that we get that image there. And it looks as though… There we go. So instead of doing the featured media, what we wanna do is this custom one, and so this will actually pull in that featured image, the thumbnail image, that you had selected when you upload the YouTube video. So I believe I want to do the default URL. Let’s see.

Width and height

I’m going to do the high one, max res. Let’s do this one. Basically, what I was looking at here is the default width and everything, and so the max res is going to be the biggest option that we can do.

Content

So here we just click the description and it will automatically put that description in there. Now, you could add more content in here if you want. For example, you could have, “In this new video we discussed five content marketing ideas for healthcare practices.”

And then you could have the title, period. And then we’d want to have the description here. You know what? I’m going to make this at H3, so you can add some of that SEO stuff in here already, just as HTML. Okay. And so it says “uses WordPress text editor, supports HTML.” So here, I added that little header tag as well as the paragraphs there. Status, so we want the status to be a draft, you could have it be published immediately, but I always recommend just double-checking to make sure that all the settings are correct.

The excerpt

It’s up to you if you utilize excerpts on places on your site. I’m going to leave this blank. Most websites do have this just be a blank field and Google then would, if it needs an excerpt from something it’ll just grab the content. Post date, what we want to do here is the date, the publish date. Okay. Post format, typically, we wanna keep this just as standard, potentially your blog has different formats there, and then the post name we use the title. Okay.

Comment status

I’m going to do closed. Typically for wellness websites and healthcare websites, we do want that to be turned off. However, if you are an influencer or something like that, keep it turned on. We don’t want it sticky. And then we can also do some tags, so for the tags, I’m just going to do… Oops, I forgot the category. So you can have the category as well, I would recommend having something with video. Let’s see. There we go. Oops, it didn’t actually… Yeah. That would be fine. Let’s save. So I’m just going to keep this one tag, we have the category selected here, you could have a different category as well, video blogs or something like that would be good, or just use the base category that you have.

Preview

And again, this is just so that you have fewer items to fill in as you’re reviewing the blog post. So we’re going to do “Test and Continue.” And we created a post. So let’s go in here and check out our post, so that you can see what it looks like. Okay. And if you take a look here, we have this post right here, so we’re going to just click to preview, and as you can see, we have “In this new video about healthcare marketing, we discussed five content marketing ideas for healthcare practices.”

Embed the video

And then it says, b, the content from the description, and you know what we forgot to do? We forgot to embed the video. So this is why you always do the test. So let’s jump on back up here and we’re going to customize the post. And so let’s put in that embed code, and what we’re going to do is, this is the embed URL, and so then you just need to put that into the correct script. So I’ll make sure to post that script down here in just one moment.

Okay, so how the embed information works from YouTube, is there is a standard information that you can even just get when you are on YouTube and you click to embed something. Again, this is just setting it up one time and then it’ll continually do it correctly. But what we wanna do here is I pasted in that information, and I want to write in this SRC, quotations, I wanna put in the correct information there. So here I’m grabbing the embed URL, and I’m just pasting it in there, or clicking so that it goes in there. So let’s just double-check to make sure that this works correctly. And I’m going to re-test. Save, we’ll go back to the posts. I might have to delete that post just to make sure that it… Yeah. Have to delete that post. Trash. Okay. Re-test.

And so an easy way to get that embed code… Again, I’ll paste it down below, sometimes those quotation marks they’ll copy and paste incorrectly just from YouTube. Click “Share.” And so we grab this embedded code.

So you can do this on any video that pops up. It doesn’t have to be yours. Copy this information right here. And again, this SRC Embed right here, this URL is that embed URL that Zapier will be able to provide for you. So that’s how I recommend getting it, I’ll just copy this just so that I can put it in our YouTube description, and then you’ll be good to go.

Final thoughts

So this is really the process that we utilize as a way to make it easier to manage all that content that you’re creating. We’re telling you to create these videos, so what’s the easiest way that’s going to save time and save money to get those videos from YouTube and then into the blog post, because you want this content to live on your blog as a way to really get the most out of it. And make sure that you have that SEO benefit as well as the ability to share it more easily to your newsletter or to an email or something like that. To get people back to the website so that hopefully they’ll end up requesting a consultation.

So if this was confusing to follow at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out, put a comment down below, it was kind of one of our more technical topics. However, Zapier does do a fantastic job, really just making sure that the steps are pretty easy to implement. If it’s your first time going into Zapier and setting up an account, it might look a little confusing. Just click that “Make a Zap” button, search for what you wanna do and you’ll be able to set it up.

Of course, we’re more than happy to schedule a consultation as well. In this call, we’ll see if we’ll be able to be a good fit for your team in order to help you with all of your digital marketing efforts.

If you’ve liked this video, please subscribe, also please check out our podcast over on Podbean and iTunes, and don’t forget to head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com.

August 26, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Healthcare Marketing, SEO, Social Speak

5 SEO Strategies to Get More Patients for Your Practice

People are searching for everything online – from restaurants that will deliver food to their doorstep, to the latest fashion trends. Searching for a health practitioner is no exception.

Your potential patients are looking for you online. The search engine is usually the first place people go to when looking for a healthcare provider. As such, the goal is to make sure you show up at the top of the search engine results page.

When done properly, SEO has the potential to earn an impressive ROI for your practice and attract the leads you need to grow.

Here are 5 SEO strategies to get more patients for your medical practice.

Optimize your website

A well-optimized website can help bring in people who are interested in your service, but who aren’t necessarily familiar with you. Not only will it help boost awareness of your practice, but you’ll also look more credible to prospective patients.

Doing SEO requires knowing who your target audience is, as well as their pain points. You need to start by conducting keyword research.

Using keywords that best describe your business and industry will help make your website more visible. Tools like Keyword Tool and Google Keyword Planner can help you find keywords and key phrases people search online to find your practice.

Create high-quality content

Building a website that highlights your service isn’t enough to get you the top spot on the search engine results page. You also need to create high-quality content.

Not too long ago, ranking your website on search engines was easy. All you need to do is write keyword-packed contents and you’ll start seeing results. But not anymore.

Search engines like Google love fresh, unique content. While keywords are still a vital ranking factor, you also have to consider the quality of your content. Write for your audience first and then search engines.

Having more custom content on your site can drive more traffic to your site and help you rank higher in search results. Write content that is interesting, informative, and unique. Make sure that you do it better than your competition.

Claim and optimize business listing

If you want to attract more patients, then you need to get listed in local directories. While most patients do use search engines when finding healthcare providers, not all of them would book an appointment immediately after making a quick Google search. In fact, studies suggest that 77% of potential patients do further research and read reviews before making a decision.

Claiming and optimizing listing on local business directories can increase your chances of being found by search engines.

Prospective patients usually visit third party sites such as Google My Business, Healthgrades, and more. You want to increase your local footprint to ensure that they find you no matter which site they are looking for. Having customer reviews will also help you gain the trust of prospective patients.

Optimize for local search

One of the best ways to convert a searcher to a patient is to ensure that your location shows up at one of the top three positions in a search engine’s “near me” map.

Potential patients usually search for facilities and doctors nearby. Optimizing your site for local search will make you more visible to people in your area, and ultimately contact you right when they need you.

Be sure to register your business on Google maps. Don’t forget to add your location to your page titles and content on your site.

Build a strong social media presence

Living in the digital world, having a social media presence is a must. While social media isn’t a direct SEO ranking factor, it does help with your ranking somehow.

If you want to get SEO benefits from your social media marketing, then you need to optimize your profile first. Also, make sure that you post updates regularly. You don’t need to create an account on different social platforms. Just choose one or two platforms and maintain an active presence on those channels.

Share your blogs on social media. This will help you reach a wider audience as well as build trust. If people start sharing your content, it’s more likely that more people will link to it. Links are a hugely important SEO ranking factor.

Final thoughts

With the world going digital at a rapid pace, more and more people are turning to the internet to find answers to their health queries and find health practitioners.

Your medical practice can’t grow if it lacks the attention of prospective patients. It’s time to start taking a more focused and strategic approach in getting your practice in front of thousands of potential patients with search engine optimization. If you still haven’t invested in SEO, then you’re giving away clicks to your competitors.

August 12, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles

Instagram, Social Speak

Instagram Stories Features

On today’s blog, we are going to be talking about Instagram Stories. We’ve done a few videos in the past on Instagram Stories, but Instagram is always adding new features to the Instagram Stories, different options you have when you do a new story, and I wanted to just walk through those today so you can see why it’s so important to do Instagram Stories.

So, let me jump on out of here real quick, and let me go into our Instagram account. And as you can see our screen, the circle icons up top are the Instagram Stories. These are what people see right away when they get on to Instagram, and people tend to scroll through Instagram Stories before they scroll through their Instagram feed. With that being said, you can see the importance of having Instagram Stories a part of your Instagram strategy. Instagram Stories only stay up for 24 hours, unless you highlight them to one of your boards, and I’ll show you how to do that.

Creating an Instagram story

Let’s go back to our home page and we wanna create an Instagram story. So you’re gonna go up to the top where you see your circle icon with the blue plus sign, you’re gonna click onto that, and this is gonna bring up the different options.

So I’m gonna put this in the background instead of my computer, so this what’s called normal option. Instagram has added a few different options for you, so this one is breezy.

If you want this effect again, you can save it here, you can send that post to somebody. This is also where you’re gonna get the twinkle. So you’ll see when people take selfies or pictures of things, that you’re gonna see these twinkles, this is underneath this normal option.

Live video

You can still do a live video, which would be just like this us talking. It will automatically cut it the correct way, and this is gonna tell you right now that you have six active followers that have the potential of watching your Instagram Live and being able to engage.

So, you would hit record here on this button and being able to start that process. So that is the live option.

Create

The next option is Create. This is where you saw in the beginning slide, the welcome to Social Speak Network. Now, I can go to create and I can click onto this happy face up here, and this is all the options that Instagram gives you, so you can add a location, you can mention somebody, you can add hashtags, you can add cute little images which are called stickers. What I love this feature is really the data that you’re able to collect from an Instagram story.

Poll

So if you have an event, you can do a register link here, but if you’re wanting to find out what your audience is looking for, where do they need help?

This is really good for your content strategy if you’re trying to figure out where people are needing help at. So you can do a poll and I can say, “Do you need more help with your social media?” You say social media marketing or your SEO website marketing. Okay, they’re two different things, but just so… And you put the answers here, social media and SEO website. So this is gonna be my question.

Now, I can change that text that I want, and I can say, “Do you need help with your social media marketing or your SEO website?”

If you’re a fitness coach and you’re wanting to do a new Zoom class, this can be something along the lines of, Would you rather do a morning class or an afternoon class? And then you can add another poll, so you would add another question here on the next slide.

Quiz

So this is just a really great feature. You can also do a quiz where… True or false.

If you’re a health coach and you’re wanting to see what your audience knows about their nutritional facts of their food, that’s a great option. Also, you can ask questions. Rather than doing a poll, you can just ask a question to your audience as well, and you can do a countdown.

So, there’s a lot of different options here on this area under Create that I really like, and so we’re just gonna exit out of this real quick, we don’t need that.

Boomerang

Boomerang is those fun videos where it takes a two-second video. Again, this is great for the Monday morning coffee cup, cheers to Monday morning. This could be a happy Friday, this can be different quick little snippet videos.

Layout

Then the one new thing that they have come out with is this layout. This is an awesome feature for product, so you can have a four-picture grid up to a six-picture grid. So this is great if you wanna take a picture of new products that have come in or if you’re highlighting staff members, you can just keep taking those and then being able to have that as a story.

Super Zoom

Then Super Zoom this is good if you can go in here, and this usually has options like hearts or flame. You’ll see it as you hold your thumb on that button, and it’s gonna just slowly but surely go deeper to an object. So this is just something if you wanted to have maybe like a quote of the day or just different features that Instagram Stories has to offer.

Highlight a story

Let’s go back to Create, and I wanna show you how to highlight a story. I’m gonna go on here, and you can change your colors if you want to as well, down here on the left, or the right-hand corner.

So, I’m gonna go back to this bluish-purple, and I’m gonna click onto the icon and I’m gonna do a poll. And my question is going to be, Would you rather have a company manage your social media marketing or your SEO and website marketing?

There’s a certain character count here, so we may have to think of that question. Let’s say, “Do you need more help with your social media or SEO website?” So let’s keep it short and simple. And then in this option here, you can say website and SEO.

So, now that I have this complete, now I just want to hit… You can change this to close friends if you have a list already made. Otherwise, I just like the stories going out to everyone, and what you can do is then just click on your stories.

Now, this can link to your Facebook as well. So if you click on to your Send to, it can go to your Facebook stories or just Instagram Stories. So what I always do is I just click on the bottom here and it’s shared. So now when we click onto that icon again up top, our story’s uploading, and it’s right here.

Now, if we want to highlight that we’re gonna click on to highlight, and if you already have these boards created, you can go into tips for you, whatever board you have that you want this in particular slide to go to, you could click right on to that and then it would say it’s added to those tips.

So, this is a way that you can go from having that Instagram story only show up here for 24 hours, to now showing up here at the end. So they’ve got through, they’ll say, “Oh, this is so great.” And then they’re gonna be able to then see that story right there.

Final thoughts

So this is just, again, another way to help you get in front of your audience stay top of mind, and this is what people are going to be seeing, as they get on to Instagram, they’re going to see the stories and click on those before they go on to the feed.

So really thinking of behind the scenes photos that you can put into the Instagram story, Instagram Exclusives for just your Instagram followers, promoting webinars, new blog posts. Those are things that Instagram Stories work really well for.

If you have any questions about your Instagram strategy, please let us know.

August 5, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Digital Marketing, Social Media, Social Speak

Social Media Overview and Scheduling Tools

Today, I want to talk about looking at your social media strategy in the big picture. A lot of the questions that we get a lot are, “How do I schedule my social media post? Where do I schedule my social media post? And how do I really just organize my social media post?” And so we’ve done a few videos on this with creating that content calendar and making sure that your posts are organized. And I just wanted to walk you through how we do it on our side, and then also show you a couple of the scheduling tools that we utilize for ourselves and our clients.

Content calendar template

So one thing that we’ve done is a content calendar template. The biggest thing with social media is making sure you are consistent and you have a plan. Most of the time, we get so caught up in work that we forget about what we want to talk about on social media, and whether you’re doing your social media internally, or you have a team like us that’s managing your social media. It’s important to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Contents ideas for your social media posts:

Blog post – You can share your most recent blog post.
Share a tip from weekly blog post with a link back to the blog or website – You can pull information from a past blog
Visual image with logo on it – It can be a motivational quote or tip of the day. You can create that in Canva.
Article or blog from outside source – Share articles from other like-minded sources. You want to remember that 80/20 rule
Product from website linking back to the page – If you have products or different services that are on the website, you can link back to those.

Switch up the content

What I like to do is the information, the post that go on to Facebook and LinkedIn, I think it’s okay if it’s the same content. I would swap the days, and then I would change around the content for Instagram. So maybe what you used on a Tuesday for a Facebook and LinkedIn post, you can reword it, add some bullet points, add in some hashtags and use it for Instagram maybe the following week. So you want to keep that content going, you can utilize it on other platforms.

I do not recommend putting the same post out at the same day, same time to all networks. It doesn’t give any value. We found that most people that follow you on Facebook are also following you on Instagram. So if you’re posting the same thing the same day, there’s no value there. So you want to be able to switch up that content. And having some type of a monthly overview, we found that to have really helped us and our clients kind of know what topics are coming next. So this is kind of that monthly overview.

Content resources

Now it’s time to write the content. So on the social media calendar, you’ll have different topics that you want to talk about.

You’ll have content resources – different websites for that curated content, the like-minded websites that you’re looking for, maybe it’s newsletters that you’re a part of – put them in here. This is supposed to be an easy place that you can just go and pull an article from the source you’ve already approved, your team has access to it.

Google sheet

You’ll notice this is all done in a Google Sheet. The reason we use a Google Sheet is because this is a platform that everyone has access to. So I can share this Google calendar with my team. And so the person that’s writing the social media posts, the person that needs to approve them, they know what’s going out.

It keeps everyone together on one platform rather than having to log into something or download, if someone has a Mac and someone has a PC, from Excel to whatever, it’s just too complicated. I like things simple and very clear. So we use Google Sheets for that.

Here, we have the content resources, we have blog topics, so this can be where we organize our blogs for the month so we know what’s going out.

Creating a content calendar

Google sheet

There are two things you can do here. Now that we know what we’re talking about for the month, we need to have a place of where we can write those social media topics.

One thing that we have done is you can, say here like the date, platform, content, image. Now the other thing that we’ve done is instead of doing this, we may say the date and then we’ll say Instagram copy, Facebook copy, LinkedIn copy, and then we’ll either say image, and then on here we’ll put hashtags as well. You can also place the key code, and then you can pull from the content calendar.

So you can change up, you can create this however it works best for you. We’ve seen a lot of different techniques on creating where you’re gonna write your social media post.

It can be blog title and first paragrah. Now obviously, you are going to put that content in here. You’re gonna have the link in here, and then the image, you can actually go to Insert, and then go to Image, and upload the image directly into this sheet.

So this is one way to keep it all in one place to be able to see, “Okay, this is going onto Instagram, this is going out onto Facebook and LinkedIn. Here’s the images that needs to go out to there, the hashtags.”

So for writing, I always like to write posts a week or two weeks or three weeks in advance. So we have our date here, so we would say Monday, then we can have Tuesday, and then through Friday, and have the copy on one sheet.

Google doc

The other way that we have seen it done is through a Google Doc. And this can be the same thing. This can be a week – May 4th to 8th. You can do a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And if you post on Saturday and Sunday, great.

You can insert your copy here and your images as well. Now, one thing that I would do is make sure that you are utilizing your images, you’re creating your images in the social media template in Canva, so they show up nicely on all platforms.

So you know that Monday, May 4th for Facebook and LinkedIn, this is the copy that’s gonna go out to those two platforms. So it’s really figuring out what works best for you.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Now let’s get into the scheduling tools. Some people like to just go directly into those scheduling tools. They have the overview of the content calendar and they say, “Okay, this is what my month will look like,” and then they go right into the scheduling tools and write their content directly in there. And that’s totally fine too. It’s just figuring out that process that works best for you.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a paid service. The one thing I really like about them is I love that they do monthly reports. So that gives you your activity for whatever platform you have that you’re utilizing on here. It gives you an overview of exactly what posts you have going out.

When you come over here to publishing, it will pop up what posts you have already scheduled for the month, the week, so it’s very clear, and then you can see each platform right here. If you go to compose, you can upload up to four pictures through Sprout Social, which is good because you like to have multiple photos on the different networks. Here, you can drop down and you can click the platforms that you want it to go to.

One really cool thing about this as well is it has this option for Instagram, the Instagram first comment. So a lot of people will have their Instagram content, and then that first comment is where they put in their 30 hashtags. So that’s a really cool feature that Sprout Social has, and then it will preview what your post will look like. Again, if you have Twitter on here, you want make sure you do Twitter separately because of that 280-character count. Now, with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, it will show 1,300. So it gives you that option, if you take off LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram 2,200. So it gives you that option. So you can go right directly into here, write your post, and then you can go to choose a date, time, and schedule it. So that’s one way of being able to just utilize a dashboard like this and be able to have all your posts in one area.

So I really like Sprout Social because of how user-friendly it is, and you’re able to see what you have scheduled. And some days you’re gonna have posts for certain networks that you just wanna go out and not for the other networks, and that’s totally okay. So just, again, figuring out that strategy for you. You can do drafts in here. With Sprout Social, it does automatically post to Instagram, which is another bonus. So it will actually post whatever post is here to your Instagram account.

Hootsuite

The second tool I want to show you is called Hootsuite. Hootsuite has a free version and a paid version. And I believe it’s still free for one or two social media platforms.

Hootsuite also schedules and posts directly to Instagram, which is great, because Instagram I feel is the social media platform that is the most manual because they didn’t have a scheduling tool before. So in here, you’ll have streams, which I really like how these streams.

Besides the reporting of Sprout Social, I love Hootsuite as a overview piece, because I can see what posts have gone out, what mentions people have mentioned us in, what activity, if people have posted to our page or what we’ve put up, what messages we have. And then we can also put on here our scheduled, unpublished, so you can go in here and again, write drafts and be able to see, organize everything in here, and it would show up like this for your scheduled ones.

So I really like Hootsuite because I do think it’s very simple to use. Again, you would go to New Post and you would type in your content, you can upload your image, videos. You’ll just click here to select the platform you want it to go to, the media you want, your text. And I really like this feature. So this is Hootsuite. Again, very simple, very user-friendly.

Buffer

The third one is called Buffer. I think they do have a free plan. It’s still very similar to the other two scheduling tools. It will tell you what you have going out. It can give you some analytics.

Now, with Buffer, it does not automatically post to Instagram. It will give you a notification on your mobile device that you have a post, and then you would need to go into your Instagram and push that post out.

So Buffer is a great tool, there’s a lot you can do with it. Like I said, it does give you some analytics. And we’ll look at the Instagram stories, strategy recommendations, and obviously that is for the paid package, but it does provide a lot of details.

When it comes to a publishing tool, it’s really a personal preference of which one aesthetically you like, which one will be the best for you and your team. And if you choose not to use a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to organize your posts and you choose to use just a platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you want make sure, again, if it’s not just you doing your social media post, you want to make sure that it’s user-friendly for you and your team.

Bonus tool: Grammarly

One thing that I’ve also installed is a plugin called Grammarly.

Grammarly works on:

Google docs
Hootsuite
Buffer
Sprout Social

I like it because it adds that extra layer of making sure that your posts are grammatically correct going out, which is important. If you put in a misspelling, it usually highlights the spelling mistake. I will go like, this doesn’t make sense, and then you can click on it, and then it will either to give you a word, “Hey, what did you mean to say here?”

Mistakes happen. It’s not a life or death thing. And I also think that with social media, having that strategy is really good because it will allow you to stop and think about what your plan is and paying attention to those details and making sure when you’re creating the images in Canva.

Final thoughts

We go back to that brand consistency that we’ve talked about. So this is just giving you the overview of your social media strategy, looking at thinking of a month at a time with your social media posts, how many times per week do you want to post, and then what’s the action you’re going to take to create those posts, and then be able to schedule them out?

There’s tons of other tools out there. These are just three scheduling tools that we have used and we enjoy using. And there’s a lot of different content strategies out there, but again, it’s finding the one that works best for you.

So if you need help creating that strategy and putting together that content calendar and getting one of these scheduling tools set up, we are here to help you.

May 6, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Healthcare Marketing, Social Speak

Top 6 Telehealth Software of 2020

Over the last decade, telehealth has gained much traction on a global scale. It is quickly becoming a pillar of modern healthcare and is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years.

Through telehealth, patients are given the option to consult a healthcare provider at the comfort of their home. This translates to happier patients, more revenue for your practice, and improved workflows that save you time. In order to facilitate these virtual visits, you will need an intuitive interface and a secure system.

What is telehealth software?

Telehealth software is the platform used by healthcare providers to provide remote clinical healthcare when they cannot meet in person. Through this software, healthcare becomes more accessible and cost-effective.

Telehealth software is not just a simple tool. Healthcare providers will need a secure portal where they can conduct remote patient examination, collect data, as well as store, share, and analyze confidential medical information and records.

There are literally hundreds of HIPAA-compliant telehealth solutions in the market. Use this as a guide to selecting the best telehealth software for your practice.

Doxy.me – https://doxy.me/

Pricing: Free for limited services

Professional: $35/month

Clinic: $50/month

Doxy.me is safe, simple, and secure platform that lets physicians meet with patients remotely. The cloud-based system can be accessed via any web browser or smarthpones.

Simple, accessible, and free of charge, doxy.me is on a mission to make telemedicine simple and easy for you.

Features include:

Free for all to use
Business Associate Agreement (BAA) included on all accounts, even the free version
High quality audio and video
Accessible from anywhere – desktop, laptop, and mobile devices
No download required
HIPAA, GDPR, PHIPA/PIPEDA & HITECH compliant

Healthie – https://gethealthie.com/

Pricing: Beginnings: $29/month

Small practice: $89/month

Practice Plus: $129/month

Group Practice: $149/month

Organization: Custom

Healthie was built specifically for nutritionists, dieticians, health coaches, and other wellness professionals. It is a web and mobile platform that allows nutrition and wellness professionals run their business and collaborate with their clients. It includes core business features such as scheduling, client education, charting, bills and payments, virtual care and more.

Healthie has all the functionality you need to run and grow your nutrition and wellness business in one software. No more cobbling together different tools.

Features include:

Access from any device – laptop, desktop, mobile phones, and tablet PCs
Range of customization and white-labeling options
Integration resources to fit your specific needs
HIPAA and PCI-compliant security
Extensive support and resources

Practice Better – https://practicebetter.io/

Pricing: Sprout Plan: Free

Starter Plan: $19

Professional Plan: $49

Plus Plan: $79

Team Plan: $135

Practice Better is a complete, secure cloud-based practice management platform for health and wellness professionals. It is packed with features designed to relieve health and wellness professionals of burdensome adminstrative tasks.

It saves you hours of work, so you can help more reach their health goals. With Practice Better, you can manage your professional recommendations from one secure place.

Features include:

Telehealth video chat
Record and manage sessions
Uncompromising security
24/7 access to files and records
Branding and customization
Automate tasks and appointment reminders
Secure chat and instant alerts

Simple Practice – https://www.simplepractice.com/

Pricing: Essential Plan: $39/ month

Professional Plan: $59

With Simple Practice, you get a secure, fully integrated video solution. Your client communication, notes, calendar, and billing are combined in one system. That means, you’ll have more time seeing your clients, getting paid, and growing your business.

Features include:

HIPAA compliant
Conduct secure video appointments with your clients
Free telehealth resources
Automated billing and insurance processing
Paperless notes and documentation
Share videos, goal tracking, worksheets, and more from your screen
Start a video call from anywhere, on any device

Chiron Health – https://chironhealth.com/

Pricing: Independent: $150/month

Enterprise: Need to request quote

Chiron Health is a powerful telehealth software solution that is designed for practices of all sizes. The system makes it easy to successfully implement a telehealth program in your practice with simple patient features, streamlined workflows, and customized plans. It allows users to schedule appointments with patients based on their availability, updates practitioner calendar.

Chiron Health also offers eligibility checks to verify informed consent documentation and insurance information.

Features include:

Streamlined patient workflow
HIPAA-compliant
Signed BAA for each client
Custom patient marketing
Patient notifications
Co-pay collection

swyMed – http://swymed.com/

Pricing: Not available on the website

swyMed is a patented telehealth software that is designed for community paramedicine programs, emergency response encounters, home and hospital health monitoring.

swyMed’s patented software overcomes traditional connectivity issues. It allows hopitals to use their medical expertise in the ambulance and at the scene of an emergency by delivering reliable, real-time video telemedicine, even in low bandwidth areas.

Features include:

Community paramedicine made easy
Extend the reach of your hospital
Reliable, real-time video telemedicine
Connects specialist and patients in live video
HIPAA compliant and fully secure
Home health solutions

Final thoughts

Considering how much traction telehealth is gaining during the current pandemic, it is important to choose a software that works for your patients and the specialty you practice. The right telehealth software has the power to change the way you provide healthcare for the better.

If you need help finding the right teleheatlh software or you’re interested in integrating telehealth into your practice, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are here to help.

We’d love to offer a free 30-minute consultation call to discuss the ins and outs of implementing a telehealth feature into your practice.

April 15, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Social Media, Social Speak

6 Strategies to Increase Patient Referrals

6 Killer Strategies to Increase Patient Referral

In today’s competitive healthcare environment, it is important to have a strong patient referral base. As a healthcare provider, you are probably aware of how powerful referrals can be for generating new patients and growing your practice.

When done right, a patient referral program can add years of income to your practice. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices your office should maintain to get new patients through the door.

Listen to the Medical Marketing Podcast

Build a strong relationship with referring practices

Professional referrals are the lifeblood of every healthcare organization. Building and nurturing those relationships is essential for bringing in new patients.

Always keep the communication lines open with the referring practice and let them know what steps you will take to address the patient’s condition. Email them, call them from time to time, or arrange lunch appointments with them. Quick updates to the referring physician about the condition and progress of the patient tells them that you are committed to patient care.

Don’t forget to thank anyone who refers a patient to your practice. This will motivate your colleague to refer you more often.

Improve customer experience

Not all referrals come from other practices. Happy patients are more likely to give you good feedback as well as refer you to their family and friends.

To create a memorable experience, it’s important to get your internal house in order so it’s ready to welcome new patients to the practice. You want to ensure that patients feel comfortable and cared for, both in the reception area and exam room. You and your staff should pay close attention to the concerns and queries of your patients and make sure that they are cared for.

A percentage of your new patients should come from referrals by existing patients. If not, then you may need to address your customer service policies. Remember, unhappy patients won’t refer you to their family and friends. Worse, they’ll tell them to stay away.

Reach out on social media

Many patients turn to social networking sites to establish an ongoing relationship with their primary care physician.

The point of social media is to effectively reach your target audience and connect with them. It gives you a tremendous opportunity to interact with patients in ways that are not possible during appointments and consultations. This is your chance to talk to them and have a friendly relation with them.

Promote engagement by starting conversations on various health topics, providing healthcare tips, and alerting patients to new services and discounts you offer. Sharing your blog posts on social media is a great way to provide valuable healthcare information while driving patients to your website to learn more.

When done right, social media marketing can help you enhance your online reputation, solidify your brand, and bolster your authority among patients.

Be a thought leader

Most doctors go into medicine to help patients, not bask in the spotlight. But there is no denying that being a thought leader can help you attract new patients.

Being a thought leader in the healthcare industry requires lots of knowledge, effort, time, and desire to impact change. To achieve this status, you need to make your expertise and ideas known.

Write blog posts that are relevant to your practice, but don’t just write just to have content out there. Make sure that you produce quality content. But it shouldn’t stop at blogging. You can educate existing and potential patients on your healthcare practice by creating videos, podcasts, and newsletters. You can also offer speaking engagements at local hospitals.

Have a web presence

Many healthcare professionals feel as though their practice should be able to thrive on its own through referrals. But given the certainty of change in healthcare, it is important for healthcare providers to have a strong online presence.

Many patients will go online to acquaint themselves with the practice prior to making an appointment. Making a good first impression starts with a well-designed, patient-friendly website. Not only will it give potential patients an easy way to get to know you, but it also makes your practice look and feels engaging.

By having your credentials, education, services, and procedures on your website, you can help instill a sense of trust in your future patients.

Get more mileage from patient testimonials

Patients want to make sure that they receive care from the best doctors in their field. Testimonials can help build trust in your practice and offer validation for the quality of your services.

Tell your patients’ success stories in a way that people will take notice. Quotes and written testimonials can be powerful marketing tools, but videos can bring testimonials to life.

Short two-minute video testimonials will capture the attention of potential patients and drive more patients through the door. To get higher-impact testimonials, you can guide patients by asking leading questions. If you are an eye doctor, you may ask questions like “How has LASIK impacted your life?” or “Are you happy with the results?”

March 18, 2020/by Caitlin McDonald

Healthcare Marketing, Social Speak

How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

Not too long ago, patients relied on word-of-mouth referrals from family and friends when looking for a healthcare provider. Others would browse through the Yellow Pages and find a hospital or practice closest to their location. Today, however, the internet has become a major force in patient decisions.

With volumes of information available online, it has empowered prospective patients to find the care they need in the moments that matter most. Patients no longer have to rely on their gut instinct, guesswork or their friend’s advice.

If you want to reach new patients, then you need to know how patients are looking for providers online. Use them to your advantage to convert those searching prospects into patients.

Social media

More than 3.5 billion people are using social media. 54% of them use it to research products, services, and even healthcare providers.

Although word-of-mouth still ranks high as a method for finding healthcare providers, social media largely contributes to how patients choose one. Many prospective patients, millennials in particular, are apt to solicit input through social media. They put a lot of trust in unbiased opinions and recommendations from other patients.

According to a PwC Health Research Institute report, 41% of patients said that social media content impacted their choice of physician or hospital. Always bring value to your patients and give them a reason to follow you. This is one of the best ways to establish a trustworthy reputation for your medical practice on social media. It can be as simple as giving tips on how to stay healthy, reminding patients of essential vaccinations or sharing information about current illnesses.

Patients turn to Google

The internet is a fantastic source of medical information. When patients do not feel well, they don’t usually think about scheduling an appointment with their doctor. Rather, they would consult Dr. Google first and research their symptoms to learn more about their condition.

Once they have a good understanding of their condition, that’s the only time they would search for a medical practitioner. They would key in keywords such as “cardiologist near me” or “diabetologist in Miami”.

If you want to reach new patients, then you want your page to rank well on Google. That means, your name must land on the on the first page of Google search engine results page. Otherwise, prospective patients won’t find you.

Use SEO to rank higher on Google. Start by dominating long-tail keywords. Research keywords that are relevant to your practice and create content based on that keyword.

Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for as the competition is lower. That means, it will take less time and money to rank compared the big and popular ones.

They read online reviews

Majority of patients would conduct online research even after receiving a recommendation or referral. They want to know what being your patient is like before scheduling an appointment.

88% of patients use online reviews as a step towards finding a new doctor. This helps new patients make a more informed decision about who to choose. They will quickly eliminate providers with poor reviews.

In the age of internet, your reputation is whatever Google says it is. If prospective patients do not find reviews online, they’d think twice about making an appointment. As a healthcare provider, you want to have a positive online brand reputation that earns the trust of patients.

A great way to improve your reputation is to list your practice on doctor review sites such as Zocdoc, WebMD, RateMDs, Vitals, and Healthgrades. These sites that can help you improve your reputation, generate new patient leads, and gain trust.

More positive reviews will ensure that you are listed ahead of competitors in search results and will drive traffic to your website.

Location-based services

Convenience is a key factor in selecting a new doctor. In fact, according to Healthgrade’s data, location is a highly significant consideration when a patient chooses a doctor or a hospital. Majority of them prefer physicians and healthcare providers within their area who can assist them with their needs.

Building your local search presence will help you gain a significant step over the competition. Google My Business is a great tool that can do wonders for your local SEO. It puts your business on the map so potential patients can find you.

It is also a good idea to optimize your website for local search. To boost your local SEO, make sure that you include your location in keyword phrases across your website. Instead of using keywords such as dentist, use dentist in Phoenix.

February 19, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles

Healthcare Marketing, Social Speak

How to Use Canva for Your Medical Practice

A question that we get asked a lot by our clients is, how do you create professional looking images for your social media posts and your blogs?

It can get a little pricey if you have a graphic designer that’s creating every single image for your digital marketing strategies. Every social media image, every Pinterest image, every Instagram, every blog. And so, we wanted to talk to you today about a tool that we use for our clients called Canva.

Reasons why you should use Canva

It’s affordable

The one thing I really like about Canva is, it’s really affordable. Now we’re talking about your social media posts and your blogs.

If you are needing images for your website, your branding materials, we highly recommend working with a graphic designer, and a branding expert to really pull in that voice. Once you’ve worked with a branding expert, you usually have a set of thoughts and brand colors that then you wanna be able to incorporate into your social media posts and your blogs.

With Canva, there is a free site and a paid site. I think the paid site is only, $14.95, and I highly recommend it.

Maintain brand consistency

One piece with social media is really to make sure that you have that brand consistency. So whether they’re looking at your website mobile-y, on the computer, they have a brochure, a business card, social media posts, they know that it is your practice from your brand’s colors.

If you look at any large company, they follow through with that. Their TV commercials to their promotional products, their social media, their website, everything has the same look and feel. And that’s exactly what you want to do with your social media marketing strategy.

You can also upload your brand kit, which is really cool, because like I said, we have those brand colors, those brand thoughts and we want to make sure we have the right logos. So, we can upload the logos in here. You can upload the exact brand colors and your brand thoughts.

In every image, our three brand fonts are gonna be this playlist correct? This one the playlist here and then Raleway. And so on each of our images for our blogs or our social media, you’re going to see one or all three, depending on the text of these fonts. You’re also going to see our brand colors.

Now, if you look on our website, you’re going to see more of these teals and the light mauve and beige. Sometimes what we have is aspect color, so we have a logo that is this yellow and this teal and that helps kinda just make up that image pop, but it’s still within our brand’s color, so we may not use this orange all the time, but we may use it as an aspect color on one of the images. So this is a great way to really stay true to that brand that your design team have put in place.

Create images for your digital marketing

The other thing with Canva is, if you click on Create A Design, they have every size you need. So this makes it really easy. You can do a poster, a logo, a card, you can do brochures, but most importantly, you have all of your digital marketing templates in here too. You have a YouTube cover. You have, if you need help making your Twitter header the right size, or your Facebook page, but most importantly social media.

So, the social media template is what we use for Instagram and for Facebook, it also does work on LinkedIn. Canva does link to Pixabay. So there’s free images in here and there are paid images.

Resize images for you

The one thing that’s also really good about Canva is you can resize them.

So let’s say you want this image you’re doing and you did a video to go with it, but you want to resize it to the YouTube thumbnail. You can click resize and you can either create a custom size Pinterest, you can type in YouTube, so this can be the YouTube thumbnail. It will look just like this, but in the YouTube thumbnail size.

So it’s going to be easy to upload, keep that brand consistency, and not have to recreate that image. Like, okay, what size was this? What did I have here? It does all the hard work for you. So that is a great tool.

Free ready to use templates

So, with Canva it will tell you if something is free, or if you have to pay for it. And they have by categories too. So if there’s something that specific that you are looking for, so let’s just type medical and they have all these different templates already in here.

Now some of them are free and some of them are paid for. One thing that I recommend if you’re looking at, let’s say you love this template, but it is not free, you can purchase it. They’re usually between $1 and $5 and then you can re-use them, but you can also create that image by yourself without having to pay for that template.

How to use Canva

This is my favorite part of social media, creating the images. It’s also the most time-consuming because you want that image to be perfect.

And so, what I always recommend and what we do for our clients is we create different templates. So we may create 7 to 10 different templates for that client. Let’s say these are the recent ones I’ve used, and so, they’re all gonna be within these 7 to 10 templates with their branded colors, their brand fonts and we rotate that.

Choose a template

Start by choosing a template. So let’s say we want to use this one – It’s world day for safety and health at work today.

So sometimes, this is the National Nurses Day, happy National Nurses Day, so sometimes they already have templates in here, and you can come in here and just change the brand colors, so we can just change this to the colors that we would have for our client.

Make necessary changes

As I have said earlier, we can change the colors to suit our brand colors. Then, we can add our logo on to it. We would change the content here, so if we wanted to change this to an accent color, but then keep this message, we can do that, or we can take out this content all together and put in our own content.

Edit texts

Now, the fun part of the text. So February is National Heart Month, so let’s add in this. So we wanna make this larger, so they have obviously different sizes that we can have, maybe I wanna make this really big, and then do this. And then National Heart Awareness Month. And let’s make this larger. So I’m using my brand colors and I can move that content wherever I want it.

So we go back to that template that we liked, we have the content here, maybe we want this to align with that there, and then we wanna have, we want this to come up a little bit, and then we wanna have in our just like our website down here, www.heartplus.com whatever your website is. We want to bring this down here with maybe some contact information.

Pick an image

Now, we obviously need something here. So you can type in a keyword. It will show you that these are the paid ones. If you click on to here, it will say free, and then you can apply filters.

So you can pick any image that you want. And again, this is where it can get a little time consuming, so you do have to play around with this a lot because it’s important to know how to search for the different images.

Play around with templates, images, and texts

I also like using ones that have the image in the back with the text overlay. I think that those are very clean and you just want to make sure that whatever your brand message is, whatever that message is, you just make sure that this image is clean and easy to read.

So maybe you’re talking about healthy eating. So again, you can just drag this image over on top of the image that’s already there and it will automatically replace it.

So now, you can change out your content here, you can change the background color if you want it to be one of your brand colors, you can do that.

Save the image for future use

So all you have to do is come in here each month when you’re creating your content, and there’s two ways of doing this. If you come back to the main page here and you go to all your designs, you can copy this design for each week.

Let’s say February is National Heart Awareness Month. And so then now you have created this template. So then next month, all you have to do is come in, change February to March and put in whatever March’s National Awareness Month is.

Change out the logo if you need to, or move it down here, add more content, or contact information. So now we have two templates, so we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going go to add new page and go to templates again. Now, if you didn’t like any of these, you can use any of these that you want and change it around.

I always like to be able to look back at the images and especially if you need to make a change, you don’t have to re-create that image all over again. So you can come in to here and you- can, the templates that we have created right here, we can then just click this and do make a copy, and then you can label them every week.

So week of February third, week of February 10th, and then you have five or seven templates in here with the content, so you can just download them.

Canva has templates based on holidays

Again, I would take some time with this to really look at which templates you like. Are you doing a lot of testimonials? Testimonials are a great way to promote your practice. So maybe something along these lines, you can do something like this where you have the testimonial here with maybe pictures of the staff that, that patient is talking about, there’s a ton of different templates in here and the thing with Canva is they’re always adding new templates based on the holidays.

So if you wanted to put out a Happy Valentines Day, you’ll find some templates here. Even if you want to use this template, you can change these colors to your branded colors. And so that’s a really great way to still have that, those posts that are, Happy Holidays, Happy Valentines Day, Groundhog Day, whatever you wanna talk about, but still keeping that brand consistency.

So take some time scrolling through here to really figure out which templates you want, and you don’t have to always just use those 10, maybe you have a brand template of 20 of them.

Final thoughts

Canva is simple, it’s fun to use. It does take a little bit of time in the beginning, but really once you have those brand templates down, it’s just changing the content and being able to download those and implement them in your social media strategy.

If you need help on how to create your branded templates or if you would like help with the management of your social media marketing, we are here for you. You can head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and schedule a free 30-minute consultation, and we would love to see how we can help you with your digital marketing strategy. Have a great day!

February 12, 2020/by Amber Irwin

Healthcare Marketing, Social Speak

How to Use Instagram to Promote Your Medical Practice

At this point, it’s no question whether or not your practice needs to be on social media. Almost everyone understands the importance of having a solid social media presence. However, most are overlooking the benefits of Instagram as a marketing platform.

Why Instagram?

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks on a global level. It has grown immensely over the years, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

Whether you’re a dentist, dermatologist, cosmetic surgeon, plastic surgeon or an oncologist, marketing your practice on Instagram is going to bring you the business you seek.

Here are some tips on how to make use of Instagram to promote your medical practice.

Plan out your grid

Instagram is a predominantly visual platform. If you’re looking to turn your viewers into followers, then you’ll need to put aside time to visually plan your feed.

Your Instagram feed is one of the first things a visitor sees when they land on your profile. You want to create a cohesive Instagram aesthetic while still showcasing content that aligns with your field of specialization. This will give visitors a feel of what your brand is about in a matter of seconds. Plus, they are more likely to follow you if they see a visually attractive and cohesive grid.

Share images people can connect with

As a medical practitioner, the last thing you want is to put off your audience with gory surgical images or pictures of intimidating medical equipment.

There are 3 things you want to accomplish when planning your Instagram content:

Engage your audience
Provide content that is informative, interesting, and inspiring to potential patients
Highlight a service you offer.

The goal is to share images people can connect with. If you’re a plastic surgeon, you may use your Instagram feed to show before and after photos. Consistently post photos of your best cases to keep people coming back for more.

With patient approval, you may also post about your patient’s success stories. This can go a long way toward alleviating fears and finding inspiration through a life-changing illness.

Use your captions to prompt discussion

While we agree that photos matter most on Instagram, that doesn’t mean that the caption should be treated as an afterthought.

People like to know that you value their thoughts and opinions. Ask them questions, tell a story or ask for their opinions. It shows you care about them and you’re interested to connect with them. Really get in there and converse with your audience.

It may seem awkward at first but go for it. You’ll be surprised at how many of your Instagram pals will be chatting and engaging with you.

Add video to your content

A picture paints a thousand words, they say. But videos can convey even more. Video has been found to drive more interactions and provides more opportunities for you to stand out. It gives you an opportunity to reach a much larger audience, show your personality, and educate your audience.

Videos can be shared in stories, in the newsfeed, and can be used to create a high-converting ad campaign. To maximize your use of video, make sure that the first few seconds of your video is attention-grabbing.

Find something that will set yourself apart

With one billion monthly active users, Instagram has become an integral part of every brand’s marketing activities. If you’re looking to amplify your presence on Instagram, then you need to up your Insta game to cut through the noise.

For instance, Dr. Sandra Lee (aka Dr. Pimple Popper) is a big hit on social media. She has more than 5 million subscribers on Youtube and over 3 million followers on Instagram. She has both entranced and grossed out her followers with her knack for popping.

Find something that will set yourself apart and give your audience a reason to keep coming back.

Hashtag strategically

Hashtags are a great way to categorize your content. It makes it easier for users to find you and reach out to your prospective audience.

Use trending hashtags to get in front of more people. Make sure, though, that these hashtags are related to your niche. You may also consider using a branded hashtag. It could be something as simple as your name or your tag line.

Prompt your followers to use your custom hashtag, and you’ll soon learn just who your superfans are.

Collaborate with influencers

These days, social media influencers are like modern-day celebrities. Consider reaching out to other influential Instagram users if you’re looking to increase your visibility.

When looking for influencers, look beyond the follower count. You want to find an influencer who will resonate with your audience and drive engagement amongst the community.

February 5, 2020/by Kathlyn Angeles

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