How To Establish Yourself As A Healthcare Leader Within Your Local Community Using Social Media

Social media is one of the most powerful communication channels to connect with potential patients and keep your practice top of mind in between appointments for existing patients. It provides you with a platform to establish yourself as a leader within your community as it gives you a direct line of communication with people within your local community.  

When you use social media effectively, you’ll soon be top of mind to those people in your community who need your services and you’ll become the “GO TO” practitioner that people will recommend to others.  

So, how do we use social media to achieve “GO TO status” and what does that look like from a practical standpoint? There are three main things that you need to do to establish yourself as a healthcare leader within your community on social media.  

1. CRAFT THE PERCEPTION 

The first thing you need to do is craft the perception. Spend some time thinking about what you want to be known for and how that relates back to your ideal target audience. You see, on social media the perception that you create is reality.   

You get to decide the lens you want people to view you through and you want to share. 

I know that for some practitioners it may feel a little uncomfortable putting yourself out there. You may be a very private person and that’s OK. You can still position yourself as a leader on social media while maintaining your privacy. You are in control of setting the parameters and boundaries. And you define the persona that you want to project to the local community. For your own peace of mind, write down your list of “off-limit” topics so that you can operate comfortably within your chosen boundaries.  

2.CREATE CONNECTION CONTENT 

Once you have defined the perception you want to portray. Focus your efforts on creating connection content that helps build your persona. Connection content makes you relatable and it enables people within your local community to get to know like and trust you.   

If you want to be known as a healthcare leader with a keen interest in helping people with specific ailments, then you need to create connective content that positions you in that way. Think about ways that you can share information about who you are and who you can help in a connective way.   

An effective strategy is to create content that invites people into your world. In a practical sense, are you able to share any information that gives your community a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes in your practice. It could be a team meeting or team training and you might snap a screenshot of the title page of the training. You might be able to give a glimpse of your morning routine and relate it back to an important health message. Or perhaps you can share some “day in the life” style of content that helps humanise you. Whilst we may think that our life is not that interesting, you would be surprised at how much interest people take in behind-the-scenes content.  

3. POSITION YOURSELF AS AN EXPERT 

To become a healthcare leader within your local community, you need to be intentional about positioning yourself as an expert.  Create content that lets people know that you have the knowledge, experience and skill set to help them. You can do this by sharing information about common trends and topics that are relevant to your ideal patients using these leading statements: 

• As a health practitioner, one of the most common questions I get asked about… 
• My patients frequently ask me….  
• Every day, I help patients who… 
• Having helped a countless number of patients with… 
• One of the biggest problems I see patients experience is… 
• A common mistake I see people make is… 

By sharing information like this regularly you’ll become known for helping people in your field of expertise.  

Remember, you are in control of crafting the perception and you set the boundaries. To establish yourself as a healthcare leader within your community you need to create connection content, invite people into your world using behind-the-scenes content and be intentional about positioning yourself as the expert. When you work at this consistently you will soon become the “GO TO” practitioner in your community.