Facebook Marketing Measurement – Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Efforts

Many practices have already begun Facebook marketing.  If you are one of them,  have you considered how you will track your effectiveness? As with any marketing activity, social media efforts should be measured.  Below are several metrics you can use to determine how you are doing.

1.  Number of Quality Fans – note the word “quality”.  Huge numbers of people who like your practice Page are likely irrelevant if those fans live outside of your geographic area or if they are not genuinely interested in your practice (for example, people “liked” your Page as a favor to a friend, however they immediately hid you from their newsfeed).

A quality community consists of existing patients, family or friends of existing patients/potential new patients (people who live within reasonable traveling distance of your practice), alliances, referral partners, neighborhood friends or colleagues, and those with a genuine interest in you, your team, or your practice.

2.  Testimonials / Word of Mouth –  Facebook testimonials are more valuable than your average  testimonial.  For one, friends of friends may have witnessed the testimonial post via Facebook’s newsfeed.  Second, the patient’s testimonial rests adjacent to their profile photo—this gives life to testimonials in ways not possible in the past.

Avid Facebook users find Facebook a convenient—and meaningful—outlet to share both what they like and dislike about businesses.  I’m happy to report that I’ve already witnessed dozens upon dozens of highly complimentary patient comments and outright raving reviews about dentists and team members.  While you may not be able to put a dollar value on testimonials, they could be the deciding factor for a new patient weighing whether you are the best fit.

3.  Website Traffic – hopefully your practice is already using a tool like Google Analytics to determine where your website traffic is coming from.  This free tool can prove invaluable by informing you where web visit referrals are originating.  Talk to your webmaster about Google Analytics or a similar report that you can easily follow.

4.  Engagement / Interaction – a unique benefit of social media is the ability to interact and converse with your audience.  Many practices are successfully using creative programs to motivate interaction.  If your Facebook Page participation is low, consider what you can do differently to change this.  A huge benefit of social marketing is the flexibility it offers.  Explore various types of programs and posts to see what interests your community most.

5. New Patients – often times practices will say they are seeing the number of new patients “from the Internet” grow.  With the addition of Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, it’s important to be able to distinguish exactly where on the internet you were found.

If you are actively marketing on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, add these choices to your patient registration forms.  This gives patients a convenient option to specify exactly where they found you, and it also serves as a reminder of your presence in these platforms. In addition you may consider a specific phone number to track where phone calls are originating.

Remember that interaction, consistency, and patience play a key role in social marketing.  It is not managed, nor can it be judged as quickly as a traditional postcard campaign.  In fact, consider social marketing a long term program.  Similar to word of mouth marketing, the movement of social metrics may be slow.  However the quality of new patient referrals via social media (conversational, relationship-focused) will be far greater than those acquired via traditional media (one-to-many, sales-oriented).

Which metrics are you tracking to measure your social marketing efforts?