As far as communities go, Facebook is one of the world’s largest.
According to company data from January 2019, the site has over 2.32 billion monthly active users with 1.52 billion people logging on every day.
That makes Facebook an ideal virtual playground for entrepreneurs. No matter how narrow the niche, the chances are extremely high that every business’s target market is represented.
In fact, there are now 90+ million business Pages on Facebook and it’s not hard to understand why.
Besides giving entrepreneurs a platform to build a business brand, expand organic reach, drive demand, and create loyal fans, the most powerful thing about the site is that it’s paid ad features allow for precision targeting like no other. Since Facebook knows almost as much about its users as its users know about themselves, the social media behemoth is like Disney World for marketers.
But why should you as a chiropractor care about Facebook marketing?
You mean besides the reasons mentioned mere seconds ago?
The answer is simple:
Marketing on Facebook means you no longer have to spend the time, energy, and financial resources on waning marketing tactics like setting up and attending screening events and health fairs.
While that’s not to say you should stop using these methods entirely, Facebook creates a unique opportunity to leverage existing pools of people who already know, like, and trust you. Through the features and tools provided, you’re in an extraordinary position to develop deep, authentic connections with people in your local area who are likely to sign up to your email lists and purchase your chiropractic treatments and products—people who will become word-of-mouth promoters.
Without question, Facebook is the ultimate community and outreach tool to help you grow your practice.
So, how can you leverage the platform for marketing purposes?
In this post, we’ll cover some key features, tools, and actionable tasks designed to optimize your efforts, enhance your experience, and skyrocket your results in an easy-to-follow three-pronged approach. Even if you’ve been tinkering with Facebook for years, you can still use this post as a guideline to ensure you have your bases covered.
Due to a steep decline in Facebook’s organic reach, some business owners feel that pursuing organic results isn’t worth the hassle. However local search optimization and strategic content are immensely effective for creating brand awareness, driving traffic, accelerating the growth of your email list, generating leads, and boosting sales. In addition, Facebook can help your chiropractic business claim prime positioning on the first page of Google search results any time a user searches your practice’s name. With 72% of consumers visiting a local business within a 5 mile radius after conducting an online search, it’s not something you want to ignore.
While you could achieve the same goals through paid methods, organic tactics can reduce the cost and effort required. It’s also important to note that organic reach has the potential to improve the effectiveness of your ads while lowering your CPC (cost per click) and making the most of your advertising dollars.
So, how do you use Facebook marketing to reap organic benefits for your chiropractic business?
Unlike other social media sites that only offer personal profiles or slightly altered business versions of those profiles, Facebook isn’t a one-trick pony. Instead you’ll find you can create a presence through a number of features and tools including your personal Facebook Profile, a business Page, and Groups.
When initially registering for a new account, Facebook will automatically assign a personal Profile to you. However, the site strictly prohibits the use of personal Timelines for commercial gain.
All is not lost, though.
Your personal Profile still plays a vital role in personal branding and there are ways you can use it to indirectly generate awareness for your practice and support your other marketing activities.
How?
1. Upload an awesome but public-safe profile picture.This image appears in the News Feeds of your followers, as well as alongside replies, posts, and comments you make when in Profile mode. It helps create brand recognition, so it needs to be a high quality image and easily identifiable. Although you should maintain an air of professionalism, think of ways you can take a fun headshot that also alludes to your personality.
This image packs a punch since it’s often the first thing people see when visiting your Profile. Besides being visually appealing and encouraging people to check out your Profile, you can use this image to drive traffic to your website or a landing page by adding a description and link when uploading the image. You can easily create your own image using a tool like Canva or outsource this task on Fiverr.
In addition to ensuring you look professional, the data in this section is searchable and can help you show up in Facebook search results under the “People” tab. You can also add links to your website and other social media profiles, effectively driving traffic to those pages. Another aspect to consider is that you can include relatable details your audience can use to get to know you better. Shared interests often spark stronger connections.
Once you’ve created your Page, go back to your Profile and insert the Page’s URL into the “Company” field of your “About” section. Anyone who hovers over the link will see a popup with a preview of your Page which they can then access to find out more about your practice and what you do.
This clever tool lets people who aren’t part of your personal network subscribe to your Profile updates without being added as a friend. This way, you can share a personal side of yourself without giving up your sense of privacy.
You can also create a Follow button and integrate it into your practice’s website so that visitors can easily find you on Facebook.
This not only puts you in friend suggestion lists on Facebook, thereby increasing your presence, but it also creates the potential for easy and more personal referrals. You can add people you know under the “Friends” tab on your Profile.
This nifty little feature lets you create and share content designed for a specific group of people, which can be helpful when you have chiropractic clients who are also friends. As with the previous tip, you can access this feature under the “Friends” tab.
Next time you publish chiropractic-specific content to your personal Timeline, you can choose relevant groups of people with an interest in what you have to say.
Although you can’t tag photos on your Page, you can tag people who are Profile friends. Tagging will add the photo to the individual’s News Feed, as well as add it to their Timeline depending on their Facebook settings. This can be great for photos taken at special chiropractic events, potentially increasing the number of people who see it. Wider reach leads to greater engagement including comments, likes, shares, and Reactions.
In step 2, we’ll dive into building and engaging your online community for further organic reach. For now, your Profile is optimized for search. Friends, family, and other acquaintances should be in no doubt as to who you are and your area of expertise in the field of chiropractic care. Just be sure to configure your account’s privacy settings to ensure that the aspects of your private life you want to keep private are hidden from clients.
A Facebook Page specifically set up and optimized to promote your practice is a key piece of the Facebook marketing puzzle. A Page not only strengthens your business’s presence, gives you a way to build relationships with followers, and drives sales and signups, it also provides incredible analytics to help you better understand your audience. Pages are highly customizable and serve as the hub of your marketing efforts and a vehicle for outreach. You can’t run paid ads without one.
With that in mind, here are some top tips to ensure your Page attracts chiropractic clients and encourages engagement:
If you’re creating a Page for your chiropractic business for the first time, make sure you select a “Brand or business” Page, include your practice’s name, and choose “chiropractor” as the category. If you have an existing Page that needs an update, you can add categories and change settings within the “About” tab.
Facebook’s default URLs are clunky and difficult to remember, making them unsuitable for promotional materials and other marketing purposes. Claim your branded URL as soon as possible so that people can easily search for you and tag you in conversations. Simply click Create Page @username” under your profile picture to make the change (e.g. @SunshineChiropractors). If your username is already in use, choose a name that makes the most sense for your practice (e.g. @SunshineChiropractorsNY).
You might need to add your mobile number to your personal profile and then verify it before you have access to this feature.
As mentioned before, this information is searchable and can help your Page rank within Facebook search results, as well as Google. In addition, you want to find ways to let visitors know about you and your business, inject your unique personality into your Page, and tailor content for your local target audience. This is the perfect way to kick-start those efforts.
You might think this tiny image is insignificant, but it can meaningfully influence your audience and affect your ability to gain more followers. Research shows certain aspects of your picture, such as your smile, eyes, and attire, make a difference to how competent, likeable, and influential you look. Even the background colors have an impact, so it’s best to test out variations. For the sake of consistency, consider using your personal Profile pic. Alternatively, use your business logo to help establish your brand identity and build recognition.
5. Add an eye-catching cover photo or video.This is a fantastic piece of Facebook real estate to tell a visual story about your business, make announcements for new products or services, promote an event, advertise a special offer, generate interest for a contest, and more. You can even add social proof like snippets from reviews. Just make sure you maximize the use of this prized space in a way that gets people to take action.
You’ll find this feature directly under your cover photo. It offers a simple and effective way to drive traffic to a dedicated landing page where you can capture leads, secure bookings, or even provide more information about your chiropractic services.
Each Page provides a general set of tabs on the left-hand side that allow visitors to navigate to various sections of your Page. However, Facebook also lets you add custom tabs using services like Heyo and ShortStack. Many business owners ignore this option, but it offers a great way to tell your story, increase subscriptions, boost engagement, feature events, and more. Consider adding podcasts, chiropractic videos, or email subscriptions to events, contests, and guides as a way to drum up interest in your practice and service offerings.
Unless you place links in strategic places and start actively marketing your Page, no one will know about it. Consider:
Again, we’ll cover the engagement side of things in step 2. For now, your Facebook Page is primed to start attracting potential chiropractic patients within your local area.
Last but not least, the next Facebook asset you should claim is a Group.
If you want to facilitate organic interactions between a community of people with similar ideas, interests, passions, and experiences, a Facebook Group is the way to go. Comparable to a mini forum, a Group offers another venue to shape the right perceptions around your business, share a more personal side with members, and solidify relationships with the individuals who matter most to your practice. Plus, Group content ranks higher than Page content in News Feed, creating opportunities for you to get the targeted eyeballs of super fans on your chiropractic content.
Groups can be public, closed, or secret, giving you the opportunity to develop genuine connections with almost anyone and share exclusive content or special deals with certain segments of your audience. Unlike Page posts that don’t always find their way into the News Feeds of your followers, Group members receive notifications when you post something new.
To maximize your marketing efforts and partake in this amazing tool, here’s what to do:
Although Facebook lets you join a whopping 6,000 Groups, there’s no way you can keep track of them all. Instead, you should approach groups strategically so that they work in your favor. After all, you ultimately want to connect with like-minded people, demonstrate your expertise, engage in meaningful conversations, and provide value.
These Groups could include communities focused on the topics of chiropractic, alternative healing, general health and wellness, fitness, specific health issues you treat, and market segments you serve such as moms with babies or athletes. Keep in mind, you’re looking to build relationships within these micro-communities and generate awareness for your practice.
When creating the Group, be sure to optimize the page by assigning it a specific focus, giving it a relevant name, selecting the right level of privacy, and uploading a visually appealing and well-branded cover photo. You should also add an interesting introductory “About” blurb, write a warm welcome message that includes a clear set of guidelines for community standards, and include 5 relevant keyword-based tags that will help your Group appear in search. Be sure to edit the Group settings to change the group type, set membership approval, create a customized email and web address, and more.
Believe it or not, Groups tend to attract members at a faster pace than Pages. As a result, they’re quickly becoming every business owner’s secret weapon in overcoming Facebook’s organic reach problem.
To boost your own Group’s success, be sure to reach out to friends, family, and email contacts who might be interested in joining. Add those who respond positively to your invitation and encourage group members to invite their friends. When allowed, you should also consider cross-promoting to other relevant groups with similar audiences. Don’t forget you can also cross-promote via your Profile, Page, emails, website, marketing collateral, and other social media sites.
Also Read: How Much Does A Chiropractic Owner Make?
If you know influential people in your community or industry, ask them to join, too. You can also create a paid Facebook Ad promoting your Group. By making promotion and growth a priority, you’ll be well on your way to better, faster results.
Before we launch into building and engaging your Facebook community, there’s one last aspect of optimization you’ll want to pursue…
The right lead magnet can grow your practice’s email list like gangbusters, but how can you use Facebook to let people know about it?
In a previous post, we covered ten awesome ways to promote your freebie on Facebook and ramp up local list growth. Nine of those techniques are organic, so they won’t cost you a penny.
We highly recommend that you check out the post for full details and step-by-step processes, but here’s a quick recap of the nine tactics:
When it comes to Groups, here are some ideas for converting members into subscribers:
The end game of Facebook marketing for chiropractors is to get leads onto your owned lists so that you can start nurturing them through your funnel. While they’re on a third-party site like Facebook, you don’t have much control. They can slip away at any moment, never to grace your Profile, Page, or Group again. As a result, you must have a way for them to enter the top of your funnel. Always keep looking for ways to create lead generation opportunities and ensure that you’re switching out offers to capture the attention of every target segment.
Vibrant and active communities that are motivated to participate will help drive organic reach and contribute to the success of your campaigns. These communities are also excellent research tools for drilling down into your target audience’s needs and wants while understanding the best way to communicate with them.
How can you ensure you’re building active communities across your Profile, Page, and Group?
Facebook uses an algorithm called News Feed that assigns your content a score based on a number of factors and determines whether it should appear in the New Feeds of your followers. With your post competing against thousands of other updates at the same time, the algorithm can be brutal.
This makes curating and creating content that’s relevant, valuable, engaging, timely, shareable, likable, and comment-worthy essential for not only increasing your News Feed score, but also improving your brand’s visibility, growing your fan base, driving traffic, generating social proof, and attracting leads organically. That’s not to mention the lift it gives to your trustworthiness and credibility as a chiropractor.
What type of content should you be posting?
The chiropractic team at Health and Harmony Wellness Center do a fantastic job of creating and curating content for their audience. If you check out their Page, you’ll notice they also strike a good balance between helpful posts and promotional messages.
When creating Facebook posts, you’ll want to make sure you optimize them for search and engagement. You can do this by incorporating keywords, including hashtags when relevant, using @ tagging to notify people when they’re mentioned, including relevant links, encouraging your followers to use Facebook Reactions, add a subtle call to action that prompts a response, and keep your posts short, friendly, and conversational.
Establishing a social media posting calendar can help you keep track of your content creation activities so that your Facebook assets remain active and your community stays engaged. Continuous promotion of your practice can appear spammy, so be sure to follow the 80/20 principle where 80% of your content is valuable, helpful, and interesting and 20% is promotional.
You can save yourself a significant amount of time by scheduling your content to publish to your Profile, Page, or Group on a specified day and at a specified time using services like MeetEdgar or PostPlanner. You can also use the “Publishing Tools” tab at the top of your Facebook Page, but you should be aware that it only schedules content for your Page Timeline. If certain updates are for a specific list or audience, make sure you target your posts when you schedule them.
To figure out the best frequency and timing of posts, monitor the reach and engagement metrics on your Facebook Page under the “Insights” tab. You’ll gain a better understanding of when your followers are online and when they have time to interact with you and your content.
There’s no point in updating your Timelines and Groups if no one will see the posts. The best way to boost their visibility, drive traffic, and build your community is by promoting your content and engaging with your audience. Keep in mind that a higher level of engagement leads to greater reach and visibility.
How do you generate engagement and encourage conversation? You can achieve this by:
The bottom line is that you’ve done the work to claim and optimize your Facebook assets, as well put in the effort to find and attract your ideal people. In order to accelerate your success, you need to spend the time building a rapport with your Facebook community. After all, it isn’t called social media for nothing, so get social.
Although it technically falls under the content section of this post, we specifically want to draw your attention to live videos. Cisco predicts that live video will grow 15-fold from 2016-2021 while Facebook’s video stats indicate that people spend 3X longer watching live video compared to video that’s no longer live. Other research reveals that 52% of marketers say video produces the best ROI.
As you can see, live streaming can be a powerful marketing tool for chiropractors. Having seen the immense benefits first-hand, we wrote a comprehensive post on Facebook Live that covers everything from why you should use it and the basics of broadcasting to implementing a Facebook Live campaign and additional tips.
To see how simple it is, here’s a quick rundown of the steps involved:
Step 1: Brainstorm ideas for broadcast-worthy content
Step 2: Decide when you’ll live stream
Step 3: Promote your Facebook Live event
Step 4: Set up your Facebook Live broadcast and Go Live
Step 5: Interact with viewers during and after the broadcast
Step 6: Optimize and promote your video after the broadcast
Step 7: Prepare for future Live feeds
We highly recommend you check out the full post to see how you can put it to use for your chiropractic business. We’ve also created an in-depth post on video covering everything from video ideation to production and creating videos for patient acquisition opportunities, so be sure to add it to your reading list, too.
Dr. Josh Axe does a stellar job at creating both pre-recorded and Facebook Live videos for his audience.
Take note of how he divides his videos into playlists based on topics that might interest his chiropractic audience. There’s a ton of inspiration out there, so take some time to see what others are doing in this space and figure out how you can start implementing some of these ideas into your own practice.
Okay, let’s move on to perhaps the most exciting marketing tool Facebook has to offer: paid ads.
Facebook has made it easier than ever to experiment with paid advertising, so if you’re not already engaged in a campaign, it’s time to step into 2019 and give it a shot.
Look, we know it can be overwhelming at first. We know there’s the fear of losing money. We even know it’s easy to get trapped in the cycle of hiring “experts” who leverage the success of others to convince you to buy their ad management package but don’t actually know the first thing about Facebook Ads.
We know because these are common things we’ve heard from our own chiropractic clients.
But here’s the thing: Facebook ads work.
And we know that because we’ve spent a truckload of dinero testing, adjusting, and optimizing campaigns to see what works. It’s why we’re the only Facebook Ads agency that offers an ROI guarantee.
Now you could stop here and spare yourself the hassle of figuring things out on your own by hiring us, but we want to make sure you’re equipped to go the DIY route if you choose.
Besides exploring Facebook ads extensively here on the Ignite Marketing blog, we’ve also created a comprehensive guide packed with offer ideas and a step-by-step process for setting up your own ads. You can download it by clicking the image below:
Facebook has also recently introduced an Ad Library as part of their effort to be more transparent. This is a great way to see what’s happening within the chiropractic industry and spy on your competitors’ ads. Alternatively, you can navigate your way to any Page and click the “See More” link in the Page Transparency section to see existing and previous campaigns.
While our offers guide gives you the complete setup process, we also want to point out that you shouldn’t only create campaigns in isolation.
In Seducing Strangers (How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling), Joshua Weltman explains that ads fall into four categories. We’ve covered these types of ads and the psychology behind them in individual posts, but here are the basics:
Here’s an example by Café of Life Marin Chiropractic Center where they’ve used language like “learn a different approach to optimal health” as a way to generate curiosity around their product and service offerings. “Dinner with the Doc” is also fantastic lead bait for attracting people into the top of their funnel.
Here’s an example of how Health and Harmony Wellness Center puts this type of ad into action for their practice:
In the following example, Madalian Chiropractic & Physical Therapy highlight what helps set their practice apart (state-of-the-art rehabilitation) while creating an offer around one of their unique therapy options:
Spark Chiropractic & Acupuncture connects with their audience over a shared sense of patriotism and love of veterans. Besides simply highlighting their shared-values, their campaign allows the community to get involved for a good cause:
While the first two ad types fall within the realm of direct response, the second two are in alignment with brand marketing. If you look at the sequence, you’ll also notice there’s a linear order to it: 1) introduce your chiropractic products and services to your audience, 2) get people to try and experience your chiropractic care, 3) explain what makes your practice different, and 4) reinforce your patient-doctor relationship through shared values and beliefs.
Even though each type of ad can run as a separate campaign, consider how you can use the entire sequence in your own marketing efforts.
Facebook isn’t new and it certainly isn’t going anywhere. You don’t have to be a marketing guru to know that it’s a tremendous tool for supporting your chiropractic business, and if you’re not on it, you’re missing out big time.
When used correctly, Facebook can have the potential to strip away outdated and ineffective marketing tactics that are costing your practice time, money, and energy. And yes, it really can deliver a practice full of patients consistently.
Whether you’re already building a presence, you’re just starting out, or you’re a marketer who’s looking for ways to market your own chiropractic clients on Facebook, bookmark this post to use as a guide—a checklist to ensure you’ve claimed and optimized your Facebook assets and that you’re using some of the platform’s top marketing tools to get your brand name in front of your target audience.
What made you look for information on Facebook marketing for chiropractors? Are you struggling with something specific? Leave a comment or share your thoughts below. If you want to explore Facebook marketing further, book a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can help.
