End-of-year Audit

THE END OF THE YEAR is a great time to undertake a social media audit. If you’ve never performed one of these, it’s a great way to find out if your time and efforts on social media are paying off.

STEP ONE: Identify a goal. As an eye care practice, a goal of social media might be to convert followers into patients.

STEP TWO: Create a way to measure this. If you don’t already have a question among your intake paperwork asking how the person came to find the practice, consider adding it. You can also create specific, trackable links, for example a bit.ly, to place on your social media, for example the about page on Facebook and the link in the bio for Instagram and Twitter. This will tell you how many people visit your website from each social platform.

STEP THREE: Identify areas for improvement. Consider tracking the number of followers, your engagement in posts and how often you post, to start. Look at those posts that garnered the most engagement; how can you create more of this to post? Look at the frequency of posts and, in platforms like Instagram and Twitter, what hashtags you’re using. All of these factors can increase your followers, engagement and, therefore, your conversion rate.

STEP FOUR: Set action steps. Go over this data with your team, if you have one, and set action steps you’ll take to improve each as well as deadlines. Reassess as needed!

If you need help, a simple Google search of “social media audit templates” nets you with results from top social media companies, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social, that offer templates as a good starting point.

Instagram Corner

GRID AESTHETIC

In “Shop Local: Eye Do and You Should Too” by Dr. Jennifer Lyerly, she touches on curating your Instagram grid, or the way posts are seen from your Instagram profile, to be aesthetically pleasing to followers. She references an article, published by Social Media Examiner, that provides four planning tools for doing so. You can find the list of tools as well as pros and cons in the article at bit.ly/36wSepA .

Some of the high-level pointers the article makes include:

→ Plan posts ahead of time. Most all social media marketers encourage this, but with managing the Instagram grid, you want to consider how this post interacts with and looks like your previous post and vice versa. For example, as Dr. Lyerly mentions, she publishes two educational posts, one photo or video and one text, as well as a behind-the-scenes photo or product spotlight, allowing her Instagram to have the airy, desired feel. Follow this practice @truevisioneye.

→ Most importantly, understand your audience. Dr. Austin Lifferth, our glaucoma columnist, understands this well on his Instagram account, @glaucomaqd, as a majority of his photos are fundus images. While he breaks this up with some other posts, his grid works for his audience!

→ Bottom line: Consider the grid to be its own entity, and there can be merits to zooming out to consider how all the posts work together there.

Observance: Holiday Safety Awareness

BECAUSE IT'S A MONTH where unwrapping presents and popping champagne bottles are a centerpiece, many organizations use December as a month to educate the public on safe toys and celebrations. The American Academy of Ophthalmology reports roughly 1 in 10 children’s eye injuries that end up in the ER are caused by toys. As such, it’s a great time to discuss with patients that, as a primary eye care provider, you are able to handle their emergent needs. Dr. Jason Miller discusses this in a previous column, specifically for contact lens concerns: bit.ly/OMAprilCL .

Use Twitter Hashtags to Connect with Patients 0nline

Dec. 4 #NationalCookieDay

→ Tis the season for sugar infusions via holiday treats and both social media and staff enjoy cookie exchanges, right?

 

 

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