Episode 34: Social Media Tips in 2023

Richard: Welcome back to Agile, a PT Leadership Podcast series. Today we have Sam Lewakowski. This is the second podcast in a three-part series on marketing. So welcome back Sam, appreciate you diving in and helping us with this topic. So the topic for today is about social media, leveraging social media, which is something that as almost a baby boomer I suppose almost, not quite, I have really limited understanding of and not only limited understanding but to kind of wrap my head around sometimes. So this is going to be an interesting topic for me to discuss with you. So I know it's really important and increasingly so. So I'm interested to find out how it could be used to leverage and to help outpatient physical therapy. So first off, what do we mean, what are we talking about when we say social media? I'm sure it covers a multitude of sense. I'd love to get your idea of what the term embraces.

Sam: Yeah. So social media is really the way that I see it, it's a pillar within the content marketing strategy of a marketing plan. Obviously, we use social media in our personal lives to stay in touch with friends and family and post your highlight reel, so to speak. But when we're talking about social media in relation to business and business marketing, it's part of the content marketing plan. So it's about creating and strategizing unique and relatable content. It's about maintaining your reputation online, keeping your ear to the ground on what your community thinks about. Definitely, an opportunity to engage with your community and connections that you have within the industry and then an avenue to celebrate staff and patients because obviously, like I said, our staff and patients are using in their personal lives as well.

Richard: It's interesting that when we talk about social media we have to well first off, it's only one pillar, isn't it? So I think it's not an either or. Whilst it can be very helpful, it's not the be all of a marketing strategy, it's just one piece. But also what I find very interesting about social media is until recently I didn't realize that really you have to segment your target population as well, which was a bit of an epiphany as common sense in a way, but you have to be quite refined about it as well. And in our business outpatient physical therapy there are different groups that you have to target within social media, is that right?

Sam: Absolutely, I mean, it varies by platform and definitely by industry. Part of our content marketing plan, a one size fit all social media plan used to be enough it used to be enough to just be on social media and post and have a today's society. Today's social media audience requires a degree of refined content, targeted content that feels transparent, authentic, all of those things that reflect who you are as a brand and what you stand for. All of those things, they need something that's a little bit more catered to their own experience.

Richard: Yes, I'm definitely showing my age here, but I can remember when social media, social media really just consisted of Facebook. And even before then, there was another tool that was competing against Facebook that eventually died out. I can't even remember it now, but that was it, wasn't it? And everyone that regardless of what you wanted to post, you just went defaulted to Facebook because that was where the eyeballs were. But there's a lot more to it now, isn't there? I can't even keep up with regards to the platform. So it seems to be a platform for pretty much anyone and everyone, isn't there? So what are the kind of main platforms that people hear about and probably use within our healthcare environment sphere?

Sam: Yeah, your big players are going to be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and probably Twitter, but honestly not really worth your time in healthcare marketing there's. TikTok can't forget about this humongous platform that is growing rapidly and in some of your smaller ones like Pinterest, and Snapchat, definitely not applicable in a business setting. And then sometimes people will loop YouTube into a social media platform. I see it kind of more as an avenue to get branded messaging out, video content out, less so an opportunity to engage with your audience, but more so as an avenue to perpetuate into what I'm looking for. Push out your branded messaging.

Richard: So it's interesting you mentioned Twitter tweeting. Obviously in the news we've got Mr. Musk who wants to buy and probably doesn't want to buy at the moment. Twitter, that to me was almost perceived as an immediate way of getting out the sound bite bite. You're saying that that perhaps doesn't work in outpatient therapy. Is that because of what we're trying to communicate and educate to our patients, do you think?

Sam: Yeah, I think Twitter moves too fast. It's almost designed now. It's almost a news outlet. People are putting out, like you said, those sound bites. Very small snippets of information rapidly twitter feeds go by the second. Your Facebook and Instagram, even TikTok feeds, the algorithm works very differently. It's going to cater content to what you've engaged with in the past. Feeds that you're interested in, profile that you're interested in, it can show you content up to days, months, even a year back. Twitter doesn't operate that way. It's extreme of consciousness almost. And in the physical therapy world, in outpatient healthcare marketing, that's just not really the goals of a social media strategy in execution.

Richard: So not only we've got to think about different social media platforms targeting different stakeholders, be it the patient, be it our employees, be it, physicians, be it payers, whomever, but also it's thinking about the type of content. So certain content will favor certain platforms. So it's really matching the platform with who your audience is, with the content you're trying to push out.

Sam: Absolutely. That's exactly how you design any piece of marketing. And social media takes it a step further, where you're almost just designing mini campaigns all of the time now.

Richard: The thing that I struggle with nowadays is you've got all these multiple platforms and I'm sure that over time there'll be more. And some of these that we've mentioned will fade somewhat and others is there noise as it pertains to just volume of content? Are we fighting a voice regardless of the platform one's using? Is it saturated yet? So if I'm a private practice owner and you want to start putting content onto social media, is there still the ability to be heard based on the fact that pretty much everyone's doing it?

Sam: Yes, I think there's still an opportunity to be heard if you've refined your content and your audience in the way that marketing professionals can. It's not about the vanity metrics of how big is my reach, how many followers do I have, how many impressions, how many eyeballs am I getting. It's about your social media strategy is about, do I have the right eyeballs on my content. What's my engagement rate like? That's the metric that we would use to measure the quality of content and actual how effective our social media strategy is. In my opinion, I 100% think that social media as a concept is probably over-saturated, way bigger than I think anybody ever anticipated it probably to be. But that's where marketing comes in. Have you curated an engaged community? Really? And it's about what their perception is of you and not necessarily what all these other people, what their other experiences are on social.

Richard: So again, things seem to have moved on by the sounds of it, whereas in the past it was measured how many followers I can get, how many clicks I can get. I remember my son came home from school and it was all about how many people were following. So it's really much more nuanced now. It's not so much how many, it's who is following. And I assume the data analytics has improved where we can actually drill down and find out who is following. So it's not so much quantity as quality, if I hear correctly.

Sam: Absolutely.

Richard: And with regards to the term engagement rate, can you just explain to me what engagement rate means?

Sam: Sure. So it's an algorithm, it's an equation. It's going to take the amount of users that a post reached and that's called impressions. And it's going to divide that by the amount of engagement that you got on a singular poster. If you're measuring your profile, how many engagements you had on an entire profile. So it's going to take how big the reach was, how engaging the post was, and it's going to give you an engagement rate. And essentially what that means to us is of the amount of people that I reached, not how engaged they are, but how engaging was content that I put out there. And that directly, it gives you a measure of, am I doing this right? Am I giving my community that I've already built? Am I giving them what they want to see and what they, you know, want to keep on their feeds, then.

Richard: Obviously, bottom line is, if you can, if you're able to, with the right platform, with the right content engage the right people. I assume, from a financial perspective, it's cheaper at the end of the day because it's it might be, say, $5 for each person that you bring through, you capture, but it's got to be cheaper than $0.50 on an entire population. So you can, I would imagine, target your spend better as well. Is that accurate?

Sam: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, there's a whole host of opportunity to and that's why I think social media is so powerful for physical therapy. Because it's an organic tool. It's free to use, there's paid opportunities to get your content placed in a certain person's vision, but organically, it's free to play. And as long as you're being strategic, unique, relatable, authentic, all of those things that society demands of us today, then yeah, I mean, you're driving visits, you're driving visits to your website, visits to your clinic. For pennies.

Richard: We'll continue the conversation after a short.

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Richard: Welcome back to Agile AMI, a physical therapy leadership podcast. Now, what are the key social media platforms? Private practice owners, small businesses, really outpatient therapy businesses. That is what platforms are really critical and key for the business. Because I could spend all day posting content and replicating it across multiple platforms, but I don't have all day. So where do you find the biggest bang for the buck?

Sam: Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook is a tool that establishes credibility. You can generate reviews. It kind of operates like a mini website where you can have contact information you cannot call to actions. It allows for a wider breadth of content. Facebook's audience is a little bit more I don't want to say forgiving, but they're a little more inclusive when it comes to the amount of content that you're putting out there. There's opportunity for lots of engagement there and then LinkedIn is really powerful from a talent acquisition, whether it's retention or acquisition of staff, the LinkedIn presence is really critical we see today, now in the job market.

Richard: So, again, the way I see it in a very simplistic manner is Facebook tends to be more patient-focused and LinkedIn tends to be more peer, professional-focused. But having said that, our colleagues, professional colleagues, what I've heard is when they are searching for an employer of choice, not only will they obviously troll LinkedIn, but they also actually look at Facebook and TikTok and the other ones at the content that's being primarily generated for patients, but they're also getting an idea and understanding of the culture of the business through actually looking at what's being provided for the patient. Is that right?

Sam: That's 100% correct. Right. The Edelman is a PR firm in out of Chicago and they put out this they call it their trust barometer every year and in 2021, their study found that there's a five to one margin of employees who prefer to work for employers that are active on social media. The way that society individuals are looking to social media as a measure of authenticity, it can't be underscored enough.

Richard: So bottom line is, if you're a company or a private practice, if you want to recruit, you have to be doing social media.

Sam: Absolutely.

Richard: Just to make everyone aware, Facebook isn't a corporate sponsor. Agile and me more than welcome for them to actually be a corporate sponsor, but no funding from Facebook. So it sounds as if social media has changed over the last few years, how it has influenced different stakeholders and also the importance of it. What have you seen? Perhaps we touched on this already, but what have you seen that's been the big changes in social media as a tool for business?

Sam: Yeah, we did talk about it a little bit, but I think just harkening back to that idea of social media establishing credibility, whether it's as a business, as an employer, whether we would call those on two different audiences, B to B, sub business to business, or B to C, business to consumer. So it's going to establish credibility, it's going to establish authenticity. And that's like, for both different audiences, there's two different ideas that you want to be there's two different ideas that you want to be capturing there. So it's more than like brand recognition for patients, but that's also credibility in the sense of patient testimonials. So proving the impact and the power of your health care when we speak about the B to B side of things. So what does credibility mean to that, to them, to that population? It's about, like you said, showing off culture, showing off who you are as an employer, what kind of experience a potential staff member could have when they come to your company, things like that.

Richard: Yeah, I'm just thinking, even short period ago, I'm thinking of, say, recruiting, for instance. But I think the same exact the same is true for patients, where I think patients and potential employees would connect with the business, be that in person telephone or through knowledge, through friends, family, referral sources, and then possibly use the website as the secondary information. Whereas what I think I'm seeing now is it's flipped, where people will, first off, go to social media, the website online presence, and then form their initial opinion and have their first experience through that because it's easier to access the information, which really is a game changer for organizations. So I think you have to be very careful, don't you, the content, because it can very easily and profoundly impact the perception of various stakeholders of your business.

Sam: Everyone's first impressions are being drawn from your digital presence, whether it's your website or social media. That's absolutely correct, and we talked about it in the first episode of this series, and that if your website is not aesthetically pleasing or aesthetically up to modern times, you can pretty much regard that business as lost. And the same goes for social media.

Richard: And I think that's borne out with you. You mentioned the Elderman Trust Barometer in 2021 with the Carson number of employees that draw their first impressions from digital media, isn't it? So what were those percentages and what did they say about the employees?

Sam: Yeah, so the Edelman Trust Barometer reported that 60% of employees will draw their first impressions from digital media. So directly in support of what we were just talking about. And then this is always the one that makes me surprised just because of the sheer amount of it. 93% of employees say that direct and transparent communication is a reason to stay with a company as well. So we're not just talking about attraction acquisition, we're also talking about retention here too.

Richard: Yeah, I think I've learnt this lesson the last few years by trying to be more engaged on social media platforms than I have at any time. And as a leader, I see it as an effective medium for communicating with employees. Probably more effective or at least as effective than kind of traditional email communications with employees. We all know that the open rate of emails is somewhat low within businesses, even high functioning businesses, but everyone seems to be on the social media piece. So I see it as a leader, even though it's an external medium, as a great way of connecting with employees.

Sam: It's a great way to connect with current employees, potential employees. But even taking it a step further, I think from what I understood from the study, the part about direct and transparent communication, it also goes about it goes to speak to things that are happening in the world as well. Potential employees and current employees are looking to their leadership to make statements and, you know, be authentic, be genuine and and speak about, you know, issues and problems that are happening even further than what's going on directly and in the company as well. So just something else to keep in mind there as well.

Richard: So a lot has changed in social media the last ten years, probably the last few years, even with COVID I'm sure that's had a profound impact on the use of social media. How do you think it's going to look the next few years, the use of social media and content and everything? Social media, what do you think will happen the next few years specifically as it pertains to how it is used and what is used for outpatient PT?

Sam: So the way that I see it, I think social media is a tool to address something that you've talked about in the podcast quite a bit, which is the 90%, the 90% problem. And maybe you can put it better than I can, but it speaks to the amount of people, Americans I believe, that have an MSK disorder related issue and aren't seeking out care just from lack of understanding or lack of awareness. So as far as you know, the impact on outpatient physical therapy and social media, I see it as addressing the 90% problem, creating an avenue, creating context and insight to what physical therapy can do as a healthcare offering. I see it also physical therapy to me is a little more niche when it comes to healthcare marketing. Definitely can have that wow factor or something we haven't seen all the time throughout the course of social media content. And so we saw a lot of those more niche communities and industries blow up on TikTok over during the pandemic when people were just searching for interesting things that were outside of their typical experience. And so I also see it as something directly in line with that. I think it has the opportunity to kind of jump on to the momentum that some of those communities have created from a video perspective. So I think there's a lot of opportunity from a video content perspective and I think more than anything, it's an opportunity to create context and awareness for what physical therapy can do for just the standard person.

Richard: It's interesting, it's the concept of the Rising Tide raises all ships and I think we have an opportunity as a profession to really improve or explain our value to customers directly like we've never had before and also increase our credibility. I'd say therapists and therapy profession do a terrible job of promoting oneself. I'm not quite sure why, but it's interesting that you say that. I think you feel the next few years with social media we can, we can have a profound impact to that and reach that 90% of people that we're not seeing but would benefit from us. We'll continue the conversation after a short music break and advertisement the world around.

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Richard:Welcome back to Agile EMI, a physical therapy leadership podcast. If we pivot a little bit and look at what can practically be done by practice owners so practice owners don't have huge budgets. In fact, even the large PT companies on the whole tend to spend a very small percentage of their revenue on marketing, which I think is short sighted, but that's the economic reality. But as a private practice owner that we have a great deal of resource, what do they need to be doing on social media? What's important for them to be doing with the resources they do have?

Sam: The overarching item that needs to be addressed on social media is just to showcase your brand. You spent years of your life building your recognition within the community, your patient database, your referral database, showcase who you are as a brand. There's so many different tiny little things that can be done underneath that, but just show who your brand is, who your clinic is, what your personality is as a leader, what your staff's personality is. I think the biggest thing that I look for when I'm researching a company truly on social media is I want to know what my experience is going to be like when I walk in the door there. And if you can give that behind the scenes context, I think you'll find that patients are going to be more engaged, more willing to follow through with their course of care because they've created a connection, they've created their impression of you prior to even coming in. They already know who your team is, they already know what the space looks like. And so nothing is they're probably most likely going to be the most engaged. At the very minimum, things that you want to be doing on social is utilizing it as if it's an opportunity to convert a potential patient. So ensuring all of your contact information is up to date, accurate. You're creating a lot of avenues for a patient to get in touch with you. So whether that's using call to actions on your social media that directs them directly to a form on your website that allows them to request an appointment, directions to your clinic, things like that, it's the small things really. Obviously, when you have a marketing team or a marketing professional on staff, you can kind of send them off and build out this content marketing strategy. But at the very least, just ensuring that if a potential patient were to find you, that they're able to get in touch with you.

Richard: And brand is interesting because we've talked about the targeting your audience and using the appropriate platform. But the brand in part, and correct me if I'm wrong, brand in part is also developed, sustained, or damaged by not only what you say, but how you say it as well, isn't it? You have to be consistent, don't you, with your messaging and how you present yourself to truly get long term brand value. Is that right?

Sam: Long term brand value. And to ensure that the people that you are reaching, you're creating an inclusive space for them. I think we've all seen those businesses on social that come unhinged or will use their business platform to make statements or say things that maybe are a little off color. And yes, you want to be creating an environment that's obviously inclusive to everyone, whether that's within your clinic or on social media.

Richard: If I remember correctly, it's like the owner of Hobby Lobby. But anyway, so if I'm in the clinic and director or owner, what type of posts and content tends to resonate with patients and prospective patients? So I've decided I'm going to use social media. I've decided the platform that I've signed up for more. So specific to patients, perhaps? What what do I need to post? You know, is it a picture of my picture of my dog? Picture of a patient on a treatment table? What tends to resonate and get that engagement?

Sam: All right, get your pens out. So the two biggest pieces of content that we see are the most engaging is either going to be patient focused or staff member focused. So under the patient focused content, obviously, those success stories, those testimonials, seem to establish legitimacy behind treatment for staff focused content. This one continues to surprise me. But if you've curated and refined your audience enough, you're going to have former or current patients who are absolutely in love with what those therapists are doing for their lives. And so they want to celebrate alongside your staff. So work anniversaries, professional achievements if they've received new certifications or credentialing personal victories. We have a really engaged audience out in Maine, and I've never seen patients get so excited for a staff member getting married or having a baby or just those personal victories that your patients want to be there and celebrate with alongside your team.

Richard: Yeah, that's sort of a funny story. I've written articles and posted them on LinkedIn and be lucky to get 100 views or 200 views and spent hours crafting, carefully crafting articles. And then I just essentially share and comment on a new tongue acquisition specialist starting employment with Alliance Physical Therapy Partners. And that went viral. I think it got thousands of views. So it was certainly a surprise to me that it's not rocket science, is it? It's oftentimes the simple stuff that gets the best attention.

Sam: Oh, yeah. I'll say you could be as strategic and academic about social media as you want to, but it's oftentimes very frustrating as a marketing professional. But you can like exactly what you just said throw a post together in 30 seconds and I mean eight times out of ten that's the one that's going to get the most views. I don't know what that says about everything I just said, don't know what.

Richard: It says about people's attention. And then not only in regards to staff focused content, you again talk about kind of patient focused content. So what tends to resonate from a patient slot?

Sam: So yeah, there's different opportunities for catering your content towards patients. What we see a lot is any kind of service or treatment focused content. So we see a lot of videos from our partners that when they have the bandwidth to be able to put those out, they perform tenfold over just a standard branded post. But show ammon different exercises, different unique treatments like harkening back to that kind of wow factor of video content, something maybe they've never seen before. Red Cords is a great example that seems to get a lot of eyeballs and interest because it's not something that is typically, like I said, it's a little bit more niche. But yes, the service focused content, different kind of stretching demonstrations, what to expect at some kind of therapy. If someone falls within one of those more unique treatments, they might be looking to your social media or even to your website too, for kind of some behind the scenes of what can I be expecting? What might it look like? What might it feel like? Things like that. And then community focus content too. Your brand is in a city, in a community, in a region and so ensuring that your brand and your presence on social media is plugged into the local community events that are happening, maybe you sponsor a team and you want to celebrate alongside them. Remembering at the end of the day that while you're managing a business on social media, it's a business of people, of human beings and maintaining that humanization as oftentimes as possible.

Richard: Now, when generating content, I imagine that there is probably a sweet spot as pertains to the length of the clip or the amount of information. People tend to be consuming smaller and smaller chunks at a time. So somebody is going to put together a little video, I think we've worked out, haven't we, roughly the length that tends to be optimum, is that right?

Sam: Yes. So under 1 minute, under 60 seconds. It is directly related to a horrifying statistic that I heard that the human attention span is now lower than a goldfish. Now I have to answer which is everyone's follow up question, which is how long is the attention span of a goldfish is 7 seconds. So the short style video platforms like vine and TikTok really did not help us out in that regard. But we see that anything. More than a minute, we really see a high drop off rate being in that 45 to 62nd. Mark is the highest performing I thought.

Richard: It was just early Alzheimer's. Obviously I can blame it on social media. 7 seconds is pretty scary. We'll continue the conversation after a short music break and advertisement at alliance, we.

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Richard: Welcome back to Agile Me, a physical therapy podcast series. So if I'm a practice owner, should I be the one that's generating all the content? Or are there people that I employ or part of my team that perhaps might be better? So who should be responsible for social media? Because I think if I did, it would probably fail very quickly because what I want to see perhaps isn't the same as what the audience wants to see. So who should be responsible for social media within perhaps a private practice?

Sam: The rule of thumb that I always say is just because someone has social media or uses social media like you said, it doesn't mean that they genuinely understand what it means to run a business and a brand on social and it doesn't have the bandwidth. Probably do support social. So my plug is always going to be having some kind of business development or marketing professional on your team that will have the knowledge and expertise to be able to run it a little bit more effectively. Many external vendors will also have really they'll have social media management services at a very low cost. If you wanted something that's a little bit lower cost and not maybe directly at taking up time on your team if it's very small, but then looking internally if you do. My preference is a front office coordinator, actually. So having someone who sees your patients every single day, who knows your brand, knows your patients by staff at their hand, they're going to be probably the one that's the most tapped into what exactly patients are looking for from an experience, whether it's in the clinic or online.

Richard: How do you hear first folks, either your front office or even probably the tech and small rehab tech because they connect with patients as well.

Sam: That's right. Any person within your clinic who's the most connected, who's going to be with patients every single day, all day, they're going to be best equipped.

Richard: And then the next question from a practical perspective is, okay, I've decided to post material. I've started doing it. How often should I be doing it? Because, interestingly, I thought the more was better but it's not necessarily the case, is it?

Sam: No, absolutely not. And you'll get dinged by social media algorithms if you're spending on posting pretty much every single day, multiple times a day. And unfortunately, it's just not a straightforward answer is how often you should be posting, is going to vary by platform. And that's definitely the biggest takeaway here, is that content and posting everything should be catered toward the platform that you're working on. Instagram isn't as a great option for someone who's looking to promote their company culture. So one or two times a week, stories every day. We click through those stories at the top of our feed. I'm on those way more than I'm in my feed now. Facebook, two to five times a week. If you have something worth posting, LinkedIn two to three times a week, you probably don't have as many b to b, so to speak, pieces of content to be pushing out there. Facebook, it's a little bit more applicable, a little bit more accessible. TikTok, I definitely make a plug for getting businesses on TikTok and plugging into those algorithms, but that's one that we haven't really cracked the code. I think it just is super dependent on the industry and then the content that you're putting out there. So anytime, one, two, three times a week. But the biggest thing, and we kind of talked about it earlier, was quality over quantity. It is not enough to just be posting something to hit a post requirement or certain cadence that you think you're supposed to be plugging into every week. If you created content that is on brand, relatable, you know, works and you're posting a ton, then there's nothing to worry about. But what you do, where you do need to start worrying is when you're just posting to post because you think you have to be on the platform, you're going to start losing audience, they're going to find your content not engaging, and it's a surefire way to start losing your own credibility on social media.

Richard: I'm glad that I am posting the amount that I should be posting. I really don't want to do more. Covered a lot of ground again. I've certainly learned quite a lot. Any final thoughts based on what we've talked about, anything else? Or any other things private practice owners should be considering as pertains to social media?

Sam: I think if I could sum it up, small scale social management is not challenging to do. There are nuances by platform, by industry, so it's not simple, but it's not challenging to do. If you have an hour in your week to think about, to go on to social media, see what's out there, see if there's any what the competitors are doing, what the trends are, and taking ten minutes a day to snap a photo, shoot it off. I think once you get started, once you kind of cross that barrier of it being kind of a scary place to market your brand. You'll find that it's extremely fun and it's a great way to build engaged and loyal patient communities.

Richard: I'm always surprised at how much fun clinicians have and also patients have looking at the relevant content as well. Certainly people do look at it regularly and want to see themselves and want to see success stories, don't they? And then the other thing is, I kind of call it Kodak moment again, showing my age as it pertains to Kodak. And I think now it's iPhone moments, isn't it? But every day there's kind of Kodak moments in the clinic and it's just taking that extra couple of seconds just to capture them, isn't it, and posting them critical.

Sam: Yeah. I think at the end of the day, we all just crave the human experience and social media is a great way to do that for your staff and for your patients.

Richard: Well, thank you, Sam. We're running out of time. I think this has been very valuable and looking forward to the final of the three series which is pertaining to, I think, website design and development and maintenance isn't there. So looking forward to that. Thanks for your time today.

Sam: Thank you.