With so much to keep track of when it comes to your social media campaigns, it can feel a bit
overwhelming if you aren’t using the best social media tools for your medical practice marketing.
With so much to keep track of when it comes to your social media campaigns, it can feel a bit overwhelming if you aren’t using the best social media tools for your medical practice marketing. When you’re manually checking the engagement of your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so much more (like Google+), you’re wasting valuable time that could be spent on making changes to bring in better engagement to your marketing and social media efforts. What can you do?
Fortunately, there are resources out there that can help consolidate all of the social media metrics for you and help you stay organized while consistently creating a savvy social media marketing campaign. Most of these resources are called “social media dashboards,” but you can also call them social media tools. Some of them have free services while others have very inexpensive services that can mean a world of difference with how you use your social media. So, which ones are the best for you?
HubSpot Social Inbox
Recently, HubSpot announced a new social media tool called Social Inbox. The new feature, which will be rolled out to all HubSpot customers, will work with your contacts database. That means that all your leads, opportunities and customers will be synchronized with social media interactions within the HubSpot social media tool. How can this help your practice? Let’s look at some of the ways:
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- When you get a Tweet from someone you will know if they are a customer or a lead in your system, and can interact with them accordingly.
- You can set up alerts so that you, or someone on your staff, will know when a lead or current patient asks for help or asks a question. A response can be sent by your staff and a series of emails about the topic can follow up and convince them to come in.
- Social Inbox adds relationship management to an already powerful stable of features for HubSpot customers that includes publishing, monitoring, analytics, and reporting.
For users of HubSpot’s software the need for third party social media dashboard may have just disappeared!
Watch this video for more on Social Inbox from HubSpot:
Buffer
Having to manually publish content to your social media profiles can be a huge time waster, especially if you’re trying to consistently publish content every week, or every day. Instead of having to deal with that headache, Buffer can easily take all of that content and publish it when you need it to be pushed out. Not only that, but the dashboard app can also offer analytics and insights into your social media accounts as well as allow multiple team members to manage the dashboard.
Buffer happens to be one of the easiest social media marketing tools out there. You can sign in using your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and then you’re ready to go. It is also a highly popular tool that many social media marketers use on a daily basis.
Buffer’s compatibility with fellow apps that allow you to publish content, such as Instapaper or Scoop.it, is seamless and there are dozens of apps you can connect with your Buffer account for even better medical practice marketing. And the best thing about Buffer? It is completely free to use!
Here’s how to install the Buffer app:
HootSuite
Similar to Buffer, HootSuite has been fully integrated with Twitter but it can also manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, and hundreds of other social networks. It can even manage certain international social networks. They do offer a free service, but you will more than likely want to try out one of their paid services because it offers more to businesses as a whole.
The biggest draw-in for HootSuite is its robust features for Twitter and Facebook. For medical practice marketing, both Twitter and Facebook can be very important and you can make the process of keeping track of your followers, who is mentioning you, and so much more very easy with HootSuite. They also provide analytics and allow multiple team members to publish content. Pricing for HootSuite includes $8.99 per month for a pro account and an enterprise level that doesn’t list pricing numbers.
Increase your social engagement with HootSuite:
TweetDeck
This is yet another very popular social media resource, especially because TweetDeck is also integrated fully with Twitter (Twitter owns TweetDeck). This makes it very seamless to publish your content on their social network without having to deal with possible problems between the dashboard or the social network. However, TweetDeck has stopped syncing with Facebook, making this particular resources the best option if you’re using mostly Twitter for your medical practice marketing.
TweetDeck has seen fit to stop supporting a mobile app as well. But, the big plus about TweetDeck is that it also has a downloadable dashboard that you can have on your desktop at all times. That means you can monitor everything without having to sign into your account through a browser, making your time much more efficient. TweetDeck is another completely free service to use as well.
New features from TweetDeck:
Sprout Social
If you’re looking for the “ultimate” experience for your medical practice marketing and social media, look no further than Sprout Social. They offer deep metrics on your viewers, engagement, and click-through rates. You can link up multiple social networking accounts and keep track of what is being posted on each as well as create automated publishing times for your content. There is the ability of collaboration among your team members, a help desk, and a complete suite of customer relationship management (CRM) tools at your disposal.
Compared to the others on this list, Sprout Social is a little bit pricier, but it is well worth it for everything they provide. Pricing begins at $39 per month with a standard account, their deluxe account is $59 per month and then their premium account is $99 per month.
Sprout Social testimonial:
These social media resources happen to be among the best in the industry, but it is up to you which one will be best for your own social media and marketing efforts. All of them offer something a little bit different and some can even be stacked on one another for even better results. Whatever the case, always be prepared with the right social media tools.
Cheat Sheet:
- HubSpot users should take full advantage of Social Inbox.
- Everyone should use Buffer for its powerful simplicity.
- Decide between HootSuite and Sprout Social if you need a 3rd party, full feature social media dashboard.
Download this helpful checklist to master Twitter for your practice:
Photo credit: Jason A Howie
