Part of my job that I really enjoy is taking care of our social media. I didn’t always like it, though. Learning to establish a professional online presence at the same time as working hard to run my new practice (and not go bankrupt in the process) was a lot of hard work and if I could have paid someone to do the social media for me, I genuinely would have.
In the early years, my efforts in maintaining that social media presence often felt like a lot of extra work for no monetary benefit and on a very good month we only reached about 300 people. Now I know that even reaching ‘only’ 300 people is actually great.
It’s huge exposure when you think about it – especially if those 300 are local and in a position to visit if they like what they see – but over the years our online presence has grown and, currently, a quiet month means our content gets seen by about 5,000 people and the highest ever was a video we posted on Facebook seen by almost a million people.
I know that may sound impressive to some, and those are numbers I used to only dream of achieving, but I’ve come to learn that getting too caught up in the metrics is an exercise in vanity, which shouldn’t be how we judge our social media success.
I can assure you that very few of the 950,000 people who saw that video about a sub-conjunctival haemorrhage will be popping over to my place for their next eye exam.
Eye for detail
What is, however, absolutely crucial is if someone looks us up on social media (for instance if they search for an optician in our area, or know us by name and want more information) that they can find us easily. They’ll see good pictures of our frames, of some of our happy patients and photos of inside our practices.
They’ll see our personality and they’ll hopefully see a place they’d like to visit for their next eye exam. Also, any visitor to our Instagram page will see we have a keen eye for design and detail, so we can absolutely be trusted to look after their eyes and help them choose the very best pair of spectacles.
Another great thing about social media, and its sometimes misleading metrics, is that more people like your content than you realise. Last week I booked an appointment for an existing patient and she told me that she saw a video I posted about different anti-glare coatings, found it very useful and now wants to upgrade her reading spectacles.
That was the worst performing video we had produced in months. The number of people who hit the like button was zero, but here’s an actual patient telling me she found it helpful, would like to get new readers even if her prescription hasn’t changed, and wants to spend an extra £40 when she does so.
I also saw a patient a few months ago who had tried to book with another practice but didn’t get a reply to her comment on their Facebook page so ended up finding us instead, which is completely indicative of the fairly recent shift in the way people look for information on businesses.
Shiny websites are all well and good but nowadays, often people are turning to social media to find out about and contact the businesses they want to visit.
I think every optical business needs a well-designed, well-thought-out social media presence. It should be an extension of your business, your clinicians and your team. If all of those aspects are expected to look and be professional, then so should your online presence, I absolutely think you could do more harm than good if you don’t take proper care of your social media.
For instance, if someone looks your practice up and your pages look awful, if the images are blurry, if your infographics look amateurish, or if you last posted six months ago, will they come and see you or will they go to the practice with a more polished online presence?
Our practice is in a good place at the moment and even though I could have farmed out the social media a long while ago, I haven’t (in fact, I now also manage the social media accounts for several other optical businesses) and I can’t help wondering where my practice would be without it.
Social media has been valuable in ways that can’t be counted by metrics and even though anything could happen to my business in the future, knowing that my practice has a good online presence makes me feel more comfortable about the years to come.
- Francesca Blackmore is owner and practice manager of Pearce & Blackmore Opticians in the Cardiff area.
