I’ll assume for the sake of this blog that your practice has a Facebook page and that someone in your practice is spending time monitoring, refining, and measuring it’s performance. If your practice doesn’t have a Facebook page, stop reading this and get one ASAP! If you have one but you can’t remember the last time you added content to it, go do THAT ASAP!

One of the most common ways you can build your practice’s brand on social media is to ask your clients, employees, vendors, etc.. to “Like” you on Facebook. This is not just an online popularity contest, though that’s certainly part of it. The number of “Likes” you have is an indirect measure of quality and provides what marketers call “signaling” to potential clients: a clear but unwritten/unspoken indicator of quality.

Let’s take an example of someone who needs to find a new veterinarian. If this person has a choice between going to two different animal hospitals that seem to be equal in all other ways (i.e. proximity to her home, quality of the website, recommendations from friends, etc.) but one practice has 150 “Likes” on Facebook and the other one has 2,000 “Likes”, who do you think she’s going to call first? She rightly assumes that in order to get 2,000 “Likes”, a practice must be doing several things right, including providing great value and client service.

Here’s a really cool infographic from KISSMetrics entitled “How to get more Likes on Facebook”.

In another post, I’ll talk about how to really supercharge your Facebook presence: content marketing, “Push marketing”, like vaccine reminders, only work when your clients are ready to buy. What about the other 99% of the time? If you’re only talking to your clients when you want something from them, you are missing the boat. That’s where content marketing comes in.