One of the first steps you should make when considering Twitter is to create a personal account, and spend some time learning how people use this service.  After signing up, find a variety of people or businesses to follow.   Make sure to find some health care accounts to follow, but also check out other accounts, based on your interest.  Most reporters and others in the media use Twitter, as do public figures such as politicians, athletes  and actors, many different types of local businesses, along with millions of individuals.  Find people who you know and/or who you are already interested in, and learn by choosing to Follow them on Twitter.

Here are some resources to help you learn more:

• The medical practice administrator’s guide to Twitter – from the Medical Group Management Association
• 7 Twitter Tips for Health Professionals – short article summarizing key things to remember when tweeting
• 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter – use this huge list of potential things to tweet about to generate ideas for your practice
• Social Media & The Medical Practice: An Introduction – this article is a bit more technical, providing a nice introduction to using Social Media (including but not limited to Twitter) for your practice
• 50 Doctors to Follow on Twitter – not all of these are related to medical practices, but they are all doctors
• Some doctors join Facebook, Twitter; others wary – U.S.A. Today article discussing pros and cons of Facebook and Twitter for doctors

Finally, check out a few examples of Twitter accounts used by health care providers:

• Mayo Clinic
• UPMC Urgent Care
• HelpMyDryEyes

Social media speaker and trainer, Mari Smith, wrote a user friendly step-by-step primer on launching a Facebook page for a business over at Social Media Examiner.  Her article, Facebook 101 For Business: Your Complete Guide starts with the assumption that you have a personal Facebook page.  From there, she guides the reader through reviewing their profile, making friends lists to separate content from personal and business friends, privacy settings, and finally, launching a business profile.

It all applies nicely to a medical practice. At the conclusion, Mari sets a goal of obtaining between 500-1000 fans. For a smaller practice, this may not be possible.  For now, don’t let numbers intimidate you, Facebook is an excellent way to connect informally with your patient base.

Facebook 101 for Business: Your Complete Guide

It’s a dangerous two-way street. Would you want your patient to have access to your personal pictures and comments from your friends? Conversely, is it wise for you, as a physician, to have access to your patient’s private life? How would you feel if your patient told you they never touch alcohol, but you find a picture of your patient drinking?

Facebook is an absolutely inappropriate forum for a doctor and patient to be discussing personal medical issues due to privacy concerns (e.g., HIPAA).

At a practice level, Facebook can be an inexpensive marketing tool to your current patients. From your personal profile, you can easily set up a page for your practice. Patients can become a fan or “Like” your page. Once a patient connects to your practice, the practice’s status updates will appear in your patients’ news feed.

Remember: It’s social media.

We’ve seen many medical practices post “practice news” such as specials, holiday hours, or seasonal reminders (”Come get your flu shot.”)  While these can be in the mix, remember, people join Facebook to share and interact with others. Letting me know that you will close early on Friday does not invite interaction.

We recommend a mix of messages that could include quick health tips, contests for prizes, local news, local restaurant shopping or family fun recommendations, staff news and photos. These add value to your patients’ Facebook experience and encourage interaction. More importantly, this humanizes your practice and keeps it top of mind with current patients.

If voluntary patient referrals is an integral part of your new patient acquisition strategy, then you will benefit from building a healthy online community in Facebook.

Here are a couple of examples of pages we “like”:

Regions Hospital

Children’s Hospital Boston

Newport Urgent Care (WFD client)

• Set up your account and install the code on your site (the code will be provided to you as part of the setup process).  If someone else designed your site, you will need to send them the code to add to the site.
• Set up access for key team members – practice owner and/or managers, webmaster, other marketing or IT personnel.  Use the “User Manager” link at the center bottom of your Analytics Overview screen to add people.
• Set up goals to track the number of visitors who stay on the site for longer than 3 or 4 minutes and who view at least 3 or 4 pages.  To manage your goals, click the Edit link in the Website Profiles section of your Analytics Overview page; from there, click “Add Goal” in the Goals section of the page, and set up goals for “Time on Site” and “Pages/Visit”.  The exact time and number of pages will depend on the averages for your site.  If you set these metrics at around the level of your site averages, then people who exceed these values may be considered highly targeted (and therefore valuable) visitors.  In future posts, I’ll go into greater detail about  how you can set and use these goals.

Once you have your account and basic goals set up, you’ll need to let the system begin to collect data. After you have a few weeks of data, you can begin to use this information to make improvements to your website and to your advertising campaigns.  For now, check in every few days to see how the reports evolve as data is collected.  In my next post on this topic, we’ll look at some of the most valuable reports and how to use them.

Sources of content include:

• Patient questions – whether you address frequently asked questions that you here when seeing patient, or you actively solicit ideas from patients for your content, answering these questions is a great way to provide content that people will want to read.
• Local resources – tips for healthy eating (from restaurants to farmer’s markets to recipes), places to
• Local events - healthy activities such as races or walk-a-thons, community events that you are exhibiting or providing services at,
• Staff activities – community service or volunteer activities, healthy hobbies, or anything else unique or inspiring that members of your staff participate in.
• Inspiring quotes – used as a basis for an article, or used on their own as a Facebook update or Twitter post.
• Guest authors – these could be other employees at your practice or health care providers who you have a referral relationship with.
• Links to articles – be sure to include some commentary (why is this article useful?) – this could be for breaking news, but also could be for seasonal information or useful statistics or trends.
• Find out how people are getting to your website – use keywords from website analytics to get ideas for what your prospects may be looking for, and the language they use when searching.
• Videos – summarize something you find online and include a link or embed it in your page, or even create your own videos.

Finally, here are some general tips to keep in mind when picking and utilizing the methods above:

• Make content development a habit.  Pick a day of the week or time of day when you regularly work on content.
• Keep a file of content ideas – jot down notes in this file, and use it to pick ideas to fully develop.
• Don’t be too self-serving – if most of your content is simply promoting your services, people will lose interest fast.
• Add value – occasionally, it is OK to post a simple link to an article or an inspiring quote on its own, but focus on adding value by creating original content.

Do you have any additional ideas for creating content, or questions about the ideas above?  Tell us about them by commenting on this article.

In the most general sense, what every medical practice needs is a content development strategy.   This content can take many forms, such as:

• a traditional blog, that allows comments from readers, and is called a blog
• a section of your website that uses blogging technology, but without the ability for readers to comment – this may be called a blog, a newsletter, a news section, or whatever fits your situation
• an email newsletter, which might be archived on your website
• status updates, wall posts, discussions, or notes posted to your practice’s Facebook Fan Page and/or Twitter account

What all these types of content have in common is that they provide a means for sharing your expertise, your personality, and the philosophy of your practice with your patients and prospective patients.  In addition, a content strategy is vital to effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So, which method should you use?  The exact answer will depend on the type of patients you serve, combined with the types and amount of resources you can devote to your content strategy.  Some questions and issues to consider when creating your strategy include:

• Who will create the content?  Doctors, owners, office manager or other staff, a freelance writer, or some combination?
• Are you prepared to interact with patients via a blog, Facebook, or Twitter?  This can allow for shorter posts that lead to a dialogue.
• Do you currently produce a newsletter of any sort, or any type of regular content that is delivered to patients?  What has or has not worked in the past?
• How much time (and/or money) are you willing to spend?  Do you prefer to spend a shorter amount of time once per week or more, or a longer period once per month?

In future posts, I’ll expand on the benefits of a blog and other aspects of a content strategy, and provide ideas for creating content.  If you have questions about how to apply a content strategy to your practice, feel free to comment on this post and/or contact us.

In the case of a health care practice, we find that “contact us” pages, lists of services offered, and biographies of doctors tend to be common landing pages due to patient searches. In addition, practices with well optimized patient education content will attract high value, targeted searches with this content.

All of these types of pages need the same basic features. They should be written in clear, easily digestible language. Your contact/location information should be on every page, and in most cases you should also include information on the hours you are open and/or how to schedule an appointment.  Finally, you should include a call to action, encouraging visitors to come in, call for an appointment, sign up for a newsletter, or request more information.

Common landing page issues:

• Too much text – people skim more than they read on the web, so your landing page should include just enough content to lead the viewer to other pages or to take some other action
• Distracting header/graphics or design elements – images should support the text, not dominate the page
• Not keeping promises – ads and other marketing devices need to match the intent of the landing page
• Lack of trust (symbols, logos, pr) – membership in local and medical organizations will help your credibility
• Asking for too much info on forms – you can always collect more information later on

How to simplify and create clear messages:

• Minimize paragraphs – use bullets, especially at the top of the page
• Design with a muted background, fixed width, and do not have header or footer span the full width of your screen
• Limit motion graphics unless they directly point to something you want people to look at, or if motion is vital to understanding the concept
• Keep font treatments to a minimum – about a dozen should be the most you use on a page, and every variation (bold, italic, different color or size) counts
• Put SEO text at bottom – keeping bullets and brief calls to action at the top
• Closing statement – clear and concise content will welcome potential patients to learn more about your practice and lead them to action

Impressive list….

Anesthesiology….

Cardiology… Dermatology…Emergency Medicine….. Gastroenterology

The list seemed endless. Ira asked him to scroll down to the U area as we held our breath.  You guess it….Urology was the only option.

According to a 2005 NYU study reported in the Journal Of Urgent Care Medicine, “Up to 70% of emergency room visits could have been treated in a lower-acuity setting or avoided altogether if early treatment had occurred before the condition progressed into an emergency”

Yet, here we are today and ER’s are at or over capacity and many local urgent care centers are reporting lower average patient per day figures than in 2009.

People are not aware that Urgent Care is a more time and cost efficient option to the ER at the moment that a medical condition arises. We find many people (like the rep mentioned above) don’t even know what Urgent care is.

With our country embattled in health care crises, urgent care should be a part of the solution.

Today’s successful urgent care provider will not just treat people seeking urgent care, but will educate the community as to why urgent care can be a more efficient option to the ER and a healthier option than doing nothing.

In future blog posts, we will discuss some solutions, and other marketing issues facing today’s urgent care provider.

If the domain is registered in the name of your web developer or other outside consultant, then it is possible for them to hold the domain hostage if you ever decide to end your relationship with them.  We have seen situations where a previous web developer will claim you have to buy your own domain back from them.

Another situation to watch out for is if the domain is registered by an employee of the practice.  If the employee leaves, you have similar risks.  The employee could hold your domain hostage and refuse to transfer it to you.  Or, they may have left on great terms, but you then loose touch with them.

If you purchased your practice from someone else, it is also possible that the domain is still in the name of the previous owner.

In any of these situations, if the contact email is from a domain you control the hosting for, and you can access the email account, then the name of the person should not matter.  Also, if your business name is attached to the registration, you can gain control of the domain, even if you can not access the email address affiliated with the account.

Recommendations:

• A practice owner should be listed as the Administrative Contact for the domain
• A web developer/consultant or IT person should be listed as the Technical Contact
• If you are buying a practice, make sure that control of website and domain name(s) is included in the contract

Earlier this week, AdWeek published an article titled “Marketer Must-Have: Original Editorial“.  If you want your website to serve as a marketing tool, then it must contain quality content that is of interest to your prospects . The reason for this, as this article points out, is that “Search and social media are the main modes of information discovery, and both engines live off vast pools of content”.

In other words, when people use search engines (including those integrated into social media sites) to research health information or find a specific type of health care provider, they will find the sites that have relevant content.  So, if you want your site to be found, you need to figure out what types of things your prospects will search for, and then make sure you have content on those topics.  This is why we recommend that health care websites include patient education articles related to any and every disease or condition that the practice treats, along with pages that describe services in a more general sense.

Depending on the resources available to your practice, WebForDoctors can help you produce content in a variety of ways.  If you have the ability to produce content, we can serve as an editor to optimize the content for search engines.  If you need help producing the content, we can provide a writer, and you can check the content to make sure it fits with your clinical philosophy.  Finally, we can work with you on a social media strategy, that will enable you to collaborate with your patients to create user generated content that will benefit your practice.

If you are looking for help producing  web content for your medical practice,  fill out this form, or call or email us today.