Social Media: It’s free and easy to plan in advance
Do you currently have a social media presence as a practice? Maybe your PPG do?
Social Media can be a great way to communicate with a large number of patients quickly and cheaply. It is especially effective when communicating last minute changes to your practice such as closure for training, marketing seasonal campaigns such as flu vaccinations, or to reach an audience who might not be accessible with other marketing methods.
Social media is already online. It’s the perfect place to share eConsult links and templates, benefits and how it works.
As with all marketing, social media will take some effort to have an affect, so we have put together the following tools to try and make life as easy as possible for you. You can either set up your own account, or you get in touch with your PPG or CCG to help post information updates about your practice for you.
Setting up a social media account:
If you don’t have an account then think about which platform would be best for your practice. You need to think about what your patients will look at. From our experience the majority of patients use either Facebook or Twitter. It might be good to look at your PPG and ask them what they currently use.
Stonehaven PPG have set up a Facebook page for the practice and patients to share news and updates. Take a look here for inspiration
Hedge End Medical Centre have set up their own Facebook page to share information. Take a look here
How to schedule posts?
There are many tools to help you schedule posts. With Facebook you can do it directly within Facebook. When you write your post you will have the option to ‘schedule’ for another time.
If you prefer to use Twitter etc. Then you might want to look at other free to use platforms such as Hootsuite: There is a good guide here:
Tagging your key people
Tagging others in your posts can help boost their publicity and reach. We would recommend tagging eConsult and then your CCG and PPG networks. Each one can then re-share the content.
Content
We have put together social media packs with content and example posts ready for you to schedule. Each one explains the benefits of eConsult or how it works.
For examples of text you might want to include and who to tag you can take a look at our own Social Media pages here:
Twitter: @eConsult_thinks
Twitter: @eTriage_thinks
Facebook: eConsult Health Limited