So many social channels. Should you be on all of them? Should you be on one of them? Something in-between? Who knows? Actually I know. On today's marketing tips for veterinarians, we're going to talk about whether you should consider dedicating resources to multiple social media channels to market your veterinary practice or animal focused business.
Goals
If you're already on a particular channel, whether that's Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok talk etc, do you know why you’re there? Two questions to answer before adding another social media platform to your veterinary marketing mix are:
- Why are you using your particular social media platform?
- What do you expect to get out of it?
When your goals are unclear it is difficult to measure your success. So if you don’t know why you’re using a particular channel, stop right there. Define your expectations. Common reasons to use a social platform include:
- Make clients aware of your practice
- Drive traffic to your website
Audience
You have to know if a particular platform is attracting the audience you want. Presumably this audience is the same audience that you're going after.
Your audience is not going to be on every social platform.
For example, 73% of millennials, people born between 81 and 94, owned pets. Of those surveyed 77% of them said that they mostly used Facebook. Coming up second was Instagram and then YouTube.
Get a good idea of who your audience is by examining your current client list. You could also survey current clients to see which platform they hang out on.
Content
If you're contemplating adding another social platform, then you have to be prepared to produce content for that platform.
Not every platform has the same type of content on it. Of course you can repurpose some things and we can get into that in another video. But, for the most part, you should make content that is appropriate for specific platforms. Content could be video, audio, photos or written articles.
For example, Instagram is going to want really beautiful photos or memes, or really succinct videos. You can produce something like that for Instagram, but you wouldn't put those things on LinkedIn. Take into account what your platform is and whether or not you can produce content for that platform.
Time
Do you have time to work on an extra platform or even your existing platform? That means time to produce the content, post content and interact with people who are commenting on your content. Do you have someone on staff who can produce and post regularly?
Essentially, if you're thinking about adding another channel, you need to think about your goals, audience, content and time you have to devote to keeping it going.