Social media represents and terrific marketing opportunity for physicians. But one of the mistakes I see made the most is the over-emphasis on social media likes as a sign of success.
Likes are nice, but they’re not what actually drives patients to book appointments.
Instead of focusing on likes, here are three social media metrics that do merit your attention.
1). Post Engagement
Post engagement is the number of times people engaged with a post through reactions, comments, shares, and clicks.
One of my primary objectives for my physician clients is driving real people to book appointments. That means that I’m far less concerned about how many likes a post gets, rather what the actual level of engagement is, with the most important elements of post engagement being shares and clicks.
2). Post Reach
Post reach is the estimated number of people who say any of your posts at least once.
This metric is more important in the sense of overall branding for your practice.
With SEO, the objective is to strategically attract qualified patients based upon what they’re searching for. When it comes to social media, post reach is the general branding that helps put you in people’s minds for when they do need help.
I like for the post reach numbers to be pretty high for your targeted location and potential patient demographics.
3). Video Views
Video views are the number of times your videos are played for at least 3 seconds.
As content consumption moves more and more towards video, this is a good metric to understand the effectiveness of the video posts.
The higher the total minutes viewed number is, the better.
From there, I like to dive deeper into what videos performed the best and use that data to inform what videos are created next.
Social media is an important outpost for any physician marketing platform, but it’s important not to fall into the trap of chasing likes.
At the end of the day, likes may make us feel good, but they’re just a vanity metric.
Spend time and effort focusing on the metrics that actually matter.