8 Social Media Tools You Need To Use In Your Private Practice
Posting to social media can bear a burden if you don’t have the proper tools and procedures in place. Heck, social media in general can be overwhelming to anyone who hasn’t grown up with it or managed campaigns with it before.
Whether it’s creating or repurposing content, managing audience interactions or tracking website views, you can now say goodbye to social media stress.
Check out some of our favorite social media tools, PLUS! an awesome guide pinpointing the best times to post on various platforms.
Scheduling & Management
Why you need it: To free up some time. Social media management tools are awesome because they take the work out of posting and replying. Each of the following tools offer different advantages, but all tools allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance, which can be a total game changer.
With these tools you’ll be able to schedule your posts, tweets, Instagrams and shares, taking the burden of manually scheduling social media off your plate.
As a social media management tool, Hootsuite can help your private practice by allowing you to schedule posts in advance on multiple platforms. It also enables you to view what people are saying about your practice and help you respond promptly.
IFTTT stands for “If This, Then That” which is exactly what it does. IFTTT helps to set up social media workflows and automations such as automatically tweeting your Facebook status update, or syncing your new Instagram post to a Pinterest board. This tool performs a task based on a trigger action, which we think is really, really cool. Examples: If someone follows me on Twitter, automatically send a “Thanks for following!” tweet.
Making Things Look Good
Why you need it: A photo is worth a million shares. And the majority of social media platforms are image-heavy. A creative, well done photo can help to increase engagement and interactions on your posts.
Don’t think you have design skills? Well, you’re selling yourself short. Because with tools like FotoJet (similar to Canva), you’ll consider yourself a pro in no time.
FotoJet is a free online graphic designer, collage maker and photo editor promising to “help make amazing works of art in minutes.” The best part about it? It has standard photo dimensions for Facebook headers, Instagram posts, Pinterest boards, and more. Never worry about your profiles looking good again.
Free Photos
Free image resources are seriously amazing. We’d love to be able to narrow down and select a single favorite free photo resource, but there are so many great ones it’s almost impossible to choose. So here are some of our favorites:
Keeping Track
Why you need it: There isn’t much of a reason to use social media in your marketing efforts if you aren’t tracking your results, and the following tools keep track of keyword performance, social insight, trends and conclusions. They also help to monitor, assess and enhance your social media private practice goals.
How can social analytics improve my marketing?
Typically, this information is used by private practices to better understand their potential client attitudes and characteristics, but also to create and implement effective strategies on different social platforms.
Often overlooked for social media measuring, Google Analytics can assess the impact of your social media marketing efforts. When creating a post for social media, Google Analytics can track, sort and analyze included backlinks which in turn will help to make sure you’re on track with your marketing goals.
Although this one isn’t free, it’s incredibly useful. BuzzSumo is a platform for discovering “engaging content and outreach opportunities” and analyzes where different topics in your niche are trending and gaining the most attention. This tool can also provide you with resources related to your private practice and can identify industry leaders.
Content Creation
Having new content to offer to your audience on a consistent basis is ideal for private practice marketing strategies. And one way of offering content is through blogging. Blogs are great for your audience reach because of how shareable they are.
There are a few great ways to increase audience reach through blogging. You could share your new post on Facebook, for example. Then, someone reads your post, loves it and shares it with her friends on Facebook. From just that one share, you now have a new group of individuals reading your post, heading over to your website and potentially scheduling an appointment. And if it even brings in three new clients, it’s more than you had before.
Brighter Vision’s Growth Platform
Okay, yes — of course we’re going to plug our own tool, but have we steered you wrong before? Just wait until you see how awesome it is before you write it off. Brighter Vision’s Growth Platform is an automated blogging tool built to help therapists with their marketing efforts.
We know that most of you don’t have time to allot for blogging, and that’s why we created our Growth Platform. Using our blogging tool, you’ll be able to choose from hundreds of well-written, niche-focused blogs and schedule them to post onto your website whenever you’d like in the future. It’s also super straightforward and painless to use, which we think is the best part.
EveryPost makes it easy to “pull together and sift through relevant multimedia content from different sources like YouTube, Instagram, Flickr and RSS feeds.” Engaging visual content can lead to more sharing, more website views and more clients. It’s always a good idea to share relevant content from other sources along with your original posts.
Best Times to Post
Even with all these tools and strategies in place, social media can feel overwhelming. Luckily, we’ve done some research for you. We looked into the best times to post on different platforms for the most post engagement.
Now get organized and simplify your life so you can focus on what really matters — Helping clients and changing lives. And drop us a line, too. What social media tools do you currently use?
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Very good article. I’m using (somewhat clumsily) some of the applets and find that they do help. As anything else, as I practice, it’ll run smoother.