Five Fabulous Facts About Facebook for the Fertility Field

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Management in Motion Blog is pleased to welcome guest blogger, Terri Davidson, MPH, to talk about using Facebook as a part of a well-designed social media marketing plan.

Facebook Isn't What It Used To Be

Get used to it. Facebook is continually changing and is definitely not as effective as it was for businesses six months ago. At the beginning of the year, Facebook changed its algorithm formula for showing and garnering impressions for posts. Why did they do this? Though I don’t have a pipeline to Facebook corporate headquarters, most pundits feel one reason is that Facebook users are following numerous pages and it needed a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. This means that if consumers have engaged with pages in the past, then they are more likely to see posts from those businesses. If they have not engaged with a brand, they probably are not going to see its posts unless they visit the page. This means brands need to work harder than ever to make sure their followers like and comment on their posts and/or take other types of action.

Face This Fact: Your Patients are Still on Facebook!

Complain as you will (and I have heard many such diatribes), your patients, referrals sources and colleagues still are using Facebook. According to Facebook in June 2014, worldwide there were over 1.28 billion monthly active Facebook users, representing a 15 percent increase year over year.

Undoubtedly many fertility patients find Facebook to be emotionally painful when they read baby announcements and other child-related posts, nonetheless, they are finding creative ways to work around this by establishing ‘infertility’ profiles with unique names like ‘Rachel TTC’, as well as participating in closed Facebook groups where only members can see their posts. Even if some social media experts are declaring a decrease or potential drop in the number of users, there still are many potential and current customers who can read your messages. So instead of longing for the good ole days of 2013, adapt.

Develop a Budget for Facebook Promoted Posts and Ads

Call me cynical, but another reason Facebook probably changed the algorithm was to ‘encourage’ business owners to pay for ads and promoted posts. After all, it has to make money to continue its service, though many Facebook page administrators have the right to feel angry after Facebook encouraged them pay for ‘likes’ to their pages. The reality is that Facebook still is the best website to accurately target your potential market. Therefore, I would encourage you to develop a budget to promote newsworthy posts that you think will garner engagement and/or buy ads for events like seminars. Facebook ads and promoted posts are very cost-effective compared to other types of advertising plus you can target, target, target them to reach your ideal customer base.

Familiarize Yourself With Facebook Insights

If you have a Facebook business page, you probably have noticed that the number of fans seeing your posts (impressions) unfortunately has been decreasing. The good news is that Facebook provides page administrators with an excellent set of insights that can help you analyze all sorts of metrics, including which posts garner the most impressions and engagement so that you can recognize trends to create similar type of posts. You can also see data about when your followers are online, where they are from and other valuable data. So use Facebook Insights so you don’t lose market share.

Post Directly on Facebook

Though it may be tempting to use third-party apps like Hoot Suite to save time and sanity, I don’t suggest doing this. First, a tweet is not the same as a Facebook post. Facebook posts can be longer and should not be filled with abbreviations, though hashtags before keywords is acceptable on Facebook. Second, I believe that posts generated on Facebook will accumulate more impressions than posts generated via an outside source. Of course, you can verify or disprove this by running your own tests and seeing which type of posts win out statistically.

Have questions about Facebook or other types of social media? Please email me at terri@terridavidsoncommunicaitions.com, direct tweet me at @marketingmaven or post on my Facebook page, Fertility Marketing Maven.

About Terri Davidson

As the founder of Davidson Communications, Terri is a marketing specialist who has worked with a variety of fertility clinics, physician practices, hospitals, home health care agencies, other health care organizations, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and small businesses.

Terri is also a member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), and serves as a Member-at-Large on the Executive Committee of the ASRM Women's Council.