In the medical marketing industry, social media is more important than ever. More and more patients are utilizing social platforms to learn about medical practices and directly interact with doctors and their staff. If social media is a part of your practice’s marketing plan, there are some aspects of your social media that can directly influence your business’ success.
In this video, Lauren Green discusses three different measures that you can use to help determine the success of your social media marketing efforts.
- Follower trends: Is your audience growth steady?
Post reach and engagement ratio: Are you creating quality content?
Referral traffic: Are your marketing efforts sending visitors to your website?
Video Transcript
Hi there, I’m Lauren with Etna Interactive, and this month we’re talking about social media and asking: Is your social media marketing working, and are you sure?
We have three simple measures that every practice leader can use to monitor their success on social media. These measures are: follower trends, post reach and engagement rate, and referral traffic.
So the first one, which is follower trends, looks at the increase or decrease in followers or likes for your social account. So, a healthy social account should have a steady increase or growth and followers over time, and you typically want to look at a time frame of at least 6 to 12 months, if not longer. Keep in mind that during promotions or campaigns or sales, your … your number of likes are going to increase more rapidly than they would during a downtime. And you’ll want to explore those spikes and drops in follows and unfollow and find the dates associated with them. You can use those dates to track back and find the content that was posted at that time and determine whether or not that content either helped or hurt your social presence. This information can all be found on the platform insights.
The next measure is the post reach and engagement ratio. This ratio will help you judge the quality of your content. It can measure individual posts as you would do on Instagram or post types as a whole, such as all videos or all photos. This is calculated by finding the average engagement and dividing it by the average reach. So that’s average engagement divided by average reach. That number should be about 10% or better, and you can find all of this data on the platform insights section by clicking on posts and then post types.
The third measure is referral traffic, and this is all found within Google Analytics. So when you log in, you’re going to want to click on aqua then all traffic and then on referrals. So that’s acquisition, all traffic, and then referrals. From there, you can look at the different social platforms and look at the increase or decrease in traffic from that platform over to your site. Again, check the date range here and make sure that you’re looking at a date range that’s representative enough of your social media efforts over time. So maybe a couple months or a couple years in scope.
So those three measures are follower trends, post reach and engagement ratio, and referral traffic. We hope this information is helpful. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We’re here to help.
Turn Social Media Data Into an Actionable Strategy
Tracking follower trends, engagement ratios, and referral traffic is only the first step. The real value comes from understanding what those numbers mean and how to use them to drive patient growth.
If you want help improving your social media performance or building a strategy that connects social activity to real practice outcomes, Etna Interactive can help.
Ready to take your marketing to the next level? Contact our social media experts today.
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