While the percentage of adults who are online has remained at about 79 percent for the past several years, a Harris poll conducted in July indicated that in 2010, the proportion of those online users who turned to the Internet for health information reached a record high of 88 percent.
Creating a Facebook fan page for your physician practice is a free, easy and increasingly essential way to leverage this phenomenon. According to Lee Aase, director of the newly created Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, Facebook is becoming the de facto directory that people use as a source for phone numbers, addresses and other contact info for friends and businesses. In other words, if you’re still spending money on Yellow Page ads to reach the 21 percent of your patients who aren’t online, it’s time to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities Facebook offers in reaching out to the majority.
And while there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to social media, experts have identified some clear traits among pages that work. Here, FiercePracticeManagement will present their top five best practices for engaging your patients through Facebook fan pages for business.
Create an extension of your practice
Despite the obvious ways a Facebook fan page can enhance your practice’s marketing, the benefits of engaging in Web 2.0 reach much farther.
“For us, we feel that it’s like an extension of the practice, and we use it to keep our community informed,” says Brandon Betancourt, practice manager of Salud Pediatrics in Algonquin, Ill. In addition to maintaining a Facebook page with nearly 250 fans, Salud also maintains a practice blog and Twitter profile-all of which are accessible through the practice website.
With Facebook use being far more prevalent among parents and adolescent patients (Betancourt guesses that one or two of his patients is on Twitter), Salud uses its Facebook page to extend the conversations the doctors and staff often wish they had more time to conduct in the office.
“The doctors obviously don’t have a lot of time to sit with patients and say, ‘visit this site, and these are my thoughts on that,’” Betancourt says. “Facebook allows us to continue that conversation in another setting and keep our community informed.”
For the most part, this means directing patients to pertinent health articles from reputable sources. “There’s a lot of stuff out there on the web, and people always seem to find the information that’s not in their best interest,” Betancourt, who provides 80 percent of the page maintenance, explains. The Facebook page helps establish Salud both as an authority on children’s wellness and also on events or concerns that are happening locally, he says.
Show your practice’s personality
People have a tendency to think of their doctors as being almost superhuman. With our lives potentially in their hands, it’s easy to forget that physicians also eat, sleep and have family lives like the rest of us. During the limited time patients spend in the office, even staff may come off as more businesslike than personable. But a business Facebook page can allow patients to see a side of the practice that isn’t so stiff, says Salud’s Betancourt.
Betancourt and the Salud physicians, one of whom is his wife, use their practice’s Facebook page to remind patients that, while they may be business owners, they are also a family just like them.
At a recent national meeting for the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Betancourts took a family CPR course and posted photos of them participating in the class on the Facebook page. Doing so not only emphasized to patients the importance of learning CPR, but also helped give a little character to the practice, Betancourt says.
Achieve a return on your time investment
Although setting up and maintaining a Facebook page for business is entirely free (though businesses have the option to purchase additional advertising), practices must make an investment of time. For Salud’s Betancourt, this means spending 30 to 40 minutes every day to every other day online compiling and sharing information and responding to comments on Facebook, Twitter and the practice’s blog.
Although a couple of hours a week may not seem unreasonable for an avid fan of social media such as Betancourt, it can be a daunting commitment for those just getting started.
Fortunately, there are ways practices can use their Facebook pages to ultimately save staff and physicians time, says Aase, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.
For example, practices can use the page to post videos answering common questions about health topics, such as the flu–and your practice’s flu shot policy–which may ultimately cut down on calls to the office or having to give the information repeatedly. A Facebook page is also a great way to notify patients about practice maintenance issues or upcoming changes.
And if one person posts a question on your page, chances are the rest of the class is wondering the same thing. One online response may ultimately represent dozens or more individual exchanges.
“You’re only limited by your creativity and figuring out things you’re doing now that may be time-consuming or repetitive or costly,” Aase says.
Apply common sense
Privacy and liability concerns scare many practices away from jumping into the social media waters. But for the most part, the rules about what is and isn’t OK to say to and about patients are the same online as they would be at a cocktail party. Simply put, avoid giving specific medical advice and refrain from sharing any confidential information.
Salud Pediatrics, with 245 Facebook fans, so far hasn’t had any problems with patients or staff posting items to the page that don’t belong there, according to practice manager Betancourt.
“The questions are very generic and doctors feel comfortable responding online,” Betancourt says. “In some cases, patients’ online medical questions also give the physicians an opportunity to say, ‘Here is an article providing a great overview of the topic, but if you call the office, we’d be happy to make an appointment to discuss the matter further.’ If anything inappropriate were posted, the practice would delete it promptly,” he adds.
Also keep in mind that most of the widely publicized Facebook privacy breaches have been cases of individuals posting to their personal profiles, not professional pages, notes the Mayo Clinic’s Aase.
“Part of what we’re doing [with the center] is to provide training to get staff up to speed on do’s and don’ts and how to maintain professionalism. Becoming more intentional that there is a business purpose for Facebook will make staff be more cognizant and less likely to create a problem,” Aase says.
Use tools to streamline your web time
The launch of your practice’s Facebook page is a good time to harness your inner geek, as a plethora of web tools exist to ultimately make maintaining your page easier, faster and more effective.
First, realize you don’t need to scour the web to come up with great information to post on your page. Take five minutes to set up a few Google Alerts, which work like customized keyword searches delivered to your email inbox at preset intervals.
To gather inspiration for his pediatric practice’s Facebook page, for example, Betancourt has alerts set up for “pediatrics,” the name of the practice and the names of the physicians. His listening post also includes RSS feeds from the American Academy of Pediatrics and healthychildren.org.
It can take some time to get the hang of these tools, but a manageable number of subscriptions can help you filter the information and come up with the best items to share with your audience, Betancourt says.
You can also streamline your posting activity by using applications such as Evernote, which allows users to create notebooks of pertinent information while away from their desks, and Hootsuite, which lets users schedule posts in advance and even track the number of clicks.
Healthcare-specific resources also are becoming more prevalent. The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, for example, will be sponsoring webinars, conference calls, an annual social media summit and more activities to help the adoption of social media tools in healthcare in a way that makes sense and is safe and helpful, says Aase.
