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Why You Still Need a Clinic Newsletter
Social media for business seemed to appear out of nowhere and suddenly it could feel as though you were being left behind if you weren't regularly posting witty content on facebook or instagram. For all of you who never really got on board, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Facebook for business has become much less effective with many posts sometimes reaching a mere 1% of your fan base without payment. This means that the head start or advantage that many business pages had is worth alot less than before.
The reach of Facebook posts has been dropping slowly over the last year and a half and recently a post of mine actually had "0' organic reach. The admin of a page with 30'000 followers recently complained about the new algorithm, noting that if they posted a catchy meme it might be shown to 20'000 people, however if they posted a link to a charity organisation it would be shown to only 200.
If you were happy with how your social media presence was going, you might be feeling quite frustrated with these changes. The Facebook algorithm is a complicated analysis of your posts and uses an increasingly obscure method of determining how relevant your post will be to it's intended audience. Like Google search engine algorithms, it is constantly being updated and currently if a post doesn't meet the right criteria, it will be shown to hardly anyone. Combine this reduced exposure with the fact that you can only boost posts that include pictures with less than 20% text on them and you can sometimes feel like those fans you worked hard for may as well not exist.
The lesson here is that the digital world is always changing, and relying on one platform for your marketing is tricky, because the hosting site has the ability and indeed the right to change the rules at any time. Facebook have acknowledged that business pages will be getting much less exposure, they say this is due to the ever increasing number of business pages all vying for attention, a need to keep users engaged and also increasing the incentive for businesses like yours to pay to boost posts.
What this means is that if you thought your email list was becoming obsolete, think again. Email is the one platform you have direct control over and should be making the most of. Your reach is unlikely to be affected by the changing world of social media and if you are providing vaulable content to your clients then engagement rates can actually be quite high. The other lost opportunity I see in many clinics is not having a printed clinic newsletter. Every day patients come in and sit for a few minutes before their appointment. Clinics will often have old magazines to read, which is a shame because in a situation like this most people don't really mind what they read. If there is a fun and interesting newsletter they would happily read this over any gossip column. The ideal clinic newsletter is educational, fun and interesting enough for patients to want to take it with them and show it to someone else.
You can write your own or have someone else do it for you. We provide a 'done for you' email newsletter complete with your clinic logo, colours and contact info that you can edit, print and email. The subscriptions come with a blog friendly version, so you can also easily copy and paste the content into any existing newsletter templates or even add it to your website blog.
