Do Social Media Posts Improve Your Online Reputation?

Recently, we’ve looked at the importance of building a practice focused on collaboration and teamwork. We’ve noted that your staff is the foundation of a strong practice and one of the first areas you will see their impact is with your online reputation.

I follow many physicians on social media who share multiple posts about medicine, their practice, and their lives and yet when I look at their online reputation, many indicate a lack of management.

It is evident that there is no strategy to manage their online reputation when ratings are below four stars, there are no recent reviews, and no response to bad reviews. To clarify the difference of these tools, social media shares what you do through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Your online reputation let’s people know how you do what you do when patients rate your performance using sites like Google, Vitals, and Healthgrades.

In my experience, physicians often believe that improving their online social media profile will improve their online reputation. Frequently they purchase a new website and sign up the same company to manage their social media accounts. This one stop shopping is easy for the physician but often what they don’t realize is that they are paying for generic posts. And no matter how much random content is posted on Twitter or Facebook, their online reputation is not magically improved.

At this point some physicians may decide to spend more money and hire a company who commits to improving their reputation. Ultimately, they are paying for more reviews that may or may not be positive and the reason is that the root cause of the bad reviews has not been addressed. From scheduling issues to staff communication, there are patterns that are found in online reviews and those issues must be addressed before more reviews are requested.

If you’d like support in transforming your online reputation and your practice, contact me at smays@impactpracticeconsultants.com.