The Future Adjustment Podcast Episode 23: Leveraging social media for your practice

Hannah: Welcome to “The Future Adjustment,” Chiropractic Economics podcast series on what’s new and notable in the world of chiropractic. I’m Hannah Fell, the associate editor of Chiropractic Economics, and our guest today is Bryan Citrin. Bryan is the president and CEO of chiropracticadvertising.com. He manages countless chiropractors around the nation helping grow their practice to capacity using the latest online strategies. His family has a rich chiropractic history with both his parent and uncle being Logan graduates with over 120 years combined of chiropractic experience. His company has been featured on Forbes and he is an active contributor to the Forbes Agency Council. Bryan, thank you so much for joining us today.

Bryan: Thanks so much. So happy to be here.

Hannah: Thanks. Now, I understand that you’ve worked with chiropractors in all walks of their practice from the new DC who has been in their practice for months to the DC who’s been in their practice for years and you’ve given them strategies on how to grow their business. Today, how about we talk about one facet chiropractors can use to grow their practice, social media and specifically, let’s focus on how chiropractors can leverage social media for increased audience engagement. For our talk, we are mainly going to focus on Facebook and Instagram since those platforms are some of the most popular for business end users. Bryan, some DCs might not have used social media before in their practice and some might already use it. What do DCs need to pay attention to with social media and why should they use it in their practice if they haven’t already?

Bryan: That’s a great question, Hannah. Thanks so much for asking that. Well, first off, Facebook has over 214 million users in the United States. And Instagram, I read recently, they have over 75 million active daily users and constantly growing. And so, I mean, your patients are on social media. It’s a fact. Your patients are on social media and you need to go where your patients are at. And so, people live on their phones these days. They live in Instagram, they live in Facebook. And so, it’s important to be in front of them because out of sight is out of mind. And it’s still important to be on social media because these days we can be like, right in front of them and you can post an update to your Facebook page, you can actually get right in front of people who are hurting and need your services. When you run an ad through social media, you can target people who are in pain, who need your services, and you can guarantee they actually see your ad. And so, it’s crucial because everybody else is doing it already. And literally, if you don’t…if you’re not on social media, the chiropractor down the street is on social media, they’re utilizing these strategies and people who are hurt and need a chiropractor are gonna go to them. But we want them to go to you instead because you have what they need.

Hannah: Now, I know you talked about some specific strategies just now with having targeted ads on your Facebook pages. What are some other strategies that chiropractors can use with their social media?

Bryan: Sure. And so, what you can do is first off, they have a good content strategy. So for example, you have the ability to go in there and schedule out content. And so, you could say, “All right.” You know, “This week I want to release these three educational articles that I wrote.” And you can actually go in on Sunday night in your…or maybe your CA can go in and actually schedule out so they automatically publish at specific dates, specific times, which is powerful. You can create educational videos where you’re just talking about maybe a specific pain point, maybe you’re talking about neck pain, maybe you’re talking about back pain, and then you’re talking about different exercise people can do from home to alleviate that. And so, you can have educational videos on there. And then another thing you can put on there is patient testimonials which is so powerful. And so, definitely get in the habit of whenever you’re hearing good stories of patients you’re getting well, ask them if they’ll be willing to do a testimonial video, and go ahead and have them sign a full release form so you can go ahead and use that online. But just film that and then you get these different testimonials that you can slowly post on your social media of people who have different ailments that have come to you and are now better, you know.

And I definitely group it by pain type. So for example, maybe go after a bunch of people that have been coming to you for awhile that are now better from back pain and then do that for neck pain, maybe do that for headaches. You know, if you have a neuropathy in your practice, maybe you have some neuropathy testimonials. But then on top of that, try to get testimonials that are gender specific. So say, well, I got mine three to five back pain male testimonials, I got my three to five back pain female testimonials because each testimonials might speak to some person differently. You know, if a guy sees a testimonial of another guy that plays golf and wasn’t able to play golf, but now I can because I saw you, he’s gonna connect better than the mother that was having problems taking care of the kids. Does that make sense?

Hannah: I think so. You know, those are some strategies that you said work really well for chiropractors and that they should really use in their practice. Which strategies would you say that chiropractors should avoid using?

Bryan: I would say a chiropractor should just avoid blindly posting stuff and boosting it without a clear cut desired strategy and I would say, don’t just blindly boost posts. I know, like, I talk to chiropractors all the time and sometimes they say, “Hey, Bryan, we social media, it doesn’t work. We can’t grow our practice. We tried boosting a couple posts, it didn’t do anything.” And whenever you boost a post, you have to have a strategy behind it. And honestly, I wouldn’t even boost posts. Like, you need to run ads on Facebook. Well, you shouldn’t boost them from a Facebook page. You should target them in the ads manager. You can target people who like your Facebook page, but I wouldn’t do it from my boosting area. If you go to business.facebook.com, you can actually have much more control over who’s seen your ads and actually have a better strategy to get in front of the right people.

Hannah: So we talked a little bit about how chiropractors can manage their reputation by responding to reviews on social media platforms and giving patient testimonials. What are some other ways that chiropractors can manage their reputation?

Bryan: I would say, make sure your information is up to date. Make sure that your address is correct. Make sure that your phone number is correct. You’ll be surprised the amount of people that have the wrong hours or the wrong address, or maybe even a wrong phone number on the social media. So, then when a patient goes to call them, it goes to the wrong number and that’s gonna make possibly a bad review or, you know, leave a bad taste in their mouth. So make sure your information is up to date, but also respond to messages in a timely manner. Don’t just respond to negative reviews if someone puts negative review on your page. But also if someone messages you, respond to their messages in a timely manner. And one thing that you can do also is I recommend installing a chatbot on your Facebook page. A chatbot can actually automatically respond to people and then do a variety of really cool things that is really good for chiropractors. Another thing I recommend doing is ask for reviews. Ask your patients when they come in if they’ll review you online. Don’t specifically ask for Yelp reviews because Yelp can actually…they specifically state not to ask for reviews and if a bunch of people will leave you a Yelp review all at once, it could actually hurt you because of Yelp’s algorithm. But tell them to go on Google and tell them to go on Facebook, and to leave a positive review if they had a good experience.

Hannah: So what are some takeaway tips that our listeners can use to help grow their practice?

Bryan: That’s a great question. I’m excited, definitely excited to answer this question specifically. So, each chiropractor needs to have a landing page specific for one purpose. And so, a tip is I’d say either hire somebody or you can do yourself if you’re tech savvy, but separate from your existing website, get some landing page software that each page has a specific purpose. So for example, you can make a page that maybe it has testimonials on it and you’re just, you know, promoting testimonials on there and someone has an opportunity to contact you to come in for a service, for one of your services. But also have like, say, a new patient special landing page, so you can promote a patient’s special and send them there. Maybe have a landing page that promotes a dinner talk or a lunch and learn seminar, and have these different landing pages that literally, whenever they click it, it’s very obvious that the one thing they can do there is put in their name and their e-mail. So it might have an information about the offer and you press a button, and you press the button, it pops a box for them to put in their contact information. And then of course, follow up with those people in a timely manner.

By having those landing pages, then you can run specific ads to