How Facebook May Be Silently Sabotaging Your Marketing

Now may be a good time to end your PT Marketing Facebook FOMO

PT Marketing With Facebook

For those of you who work with me on strategic marketing plans, you already know how I feel about PT marketing with Facebook. I rank FB very low on the priority list, and recent changes to the FB content feed raise additional concerns. I also know that my thoughts on social media conflict with many other physical therapy marketing companies who hype it up with expensive workshops and seminars. All that hype can lead to PT Marketing-FOMO – if you’re not making posts to Facebook, then you must be missing out, right?

I say emphatically, NO, you’re not missing out. PT marketing with Facebook plays, at best, a supporting role in a well-run PT marketing system. In fact, you’re way ahead of the game if you redirect 95% of your FB effort into other more productive marketing essentials. And if my advice isn’t enough to motivate you to redirect your FB effort, then consider the recent post from Mark Zuckerberg, shown below…

2 Reasons Why Facebook Is BAD MARKETING for PT Clinics

Reason #1- Mark Zuckerberg Says So

Recent policy changes at Facebook will deemphasize posts from businesses. Earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg shared his reasoning for burying most of your freshly minted business posts…

“Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.We built…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, January 11, 2018

And since Zuckerberg made that public announcement, political events have created even more pressure for FB to beef up privacy settings to help users filter out most of the content your clinic will post.

These changes will most certainly make it harder for businesses like a PT clinic to get exposure with free posts.* Even more importantly, free posts are not really free anyway, and that brings us to my chief concern, Reason #2…

Reason #2 – Focusing On Facebook Wastes Precious PT Marketing Resources

Small independent clinics emphasizing FB typically invest 40-60% of their content effort in creating these types of “social” posts. That leaves about 50% for all other marketing essentials. Even if the remaining 50% of your potential effort could cover all the other higher priorities (see table below), it’s still an incredible waste of resources.

In addition, the good news for those with a robust history of posts is that relegating FB to a supporting role doesn’t mean it won’t get done. In fact, it should get easier, and even better. That’s because when you redirect all that effort to more essential content, you’ll create plenty of engaging, relevant content to feed into Facebook, Twitter, or any other social platform with a couple of clicks.

Once you’ve resolved your Facebook, FOMO, it’s time to focus on the marketing essentials we know work best.

Top Physical Therapy Marketing Essentials That Outperform Facebook – GUARANTEED

Essential Objective Business Benefit
Internal Marketing Increase compliance, service utilization, and average patient lifetime value. Quickest way to increase revenue, patient satisfaction, and referrals without expensive advertising.
Website & Digital Marketing Build search engine authority with on-page quality content, increase new patient acquisition rates through search (inbound marketing), and improve online patient services. A good site design and content structure will attract traffic, qualify patients to a great extent, and add value through customer service features, including Facebook events & posts.
Consumer Marketing
Direct Response Format		 Increase new patient acquisition rates through outbound marketing, and generate highly qualified prospective patient leads. Build brand awareness with targeted campaigns that get high open rates and spur additional patient bookings.
Physician Marketing Separate your practice from the competition and become the standard bearer for specific treatment programs and clinical innovation. Easily pinpoint and identify a high-value target list. Increase existing referral rates, acquire new referral sources, and influence referral behavior.

Facebook has become a dominant platform, no question, but as a marketing priority, it fits some products and services better than others. But when it comes to healthcare decisions, ask yourself, when was the last time you looked to Facebook for your diagnosis and treatment options? Maybe a few readers have, but most do not.

In conclusion, work Facebook and social media into your essential marketing, not the other way around. To see what we mean, join us on a Local SEO Web conference and put Facebook back where it belongs.

Thanks for reading!

*Update: Two days after this post was published, the WSJ reported a possible ad revenue bonanza for Google and Facebook due to the push for stricter opt-in privacy policies. Why? The author suggests that stricter and more complex opt-in policies will make consumers stingier with permission grants. This means smaller brands, like the typical PT clinic, may have even more content filters to overcome.