Social media experts recommend you keep your audience engaged by posting on Facebook every day, on Instagram three times per day, and on Twitter fifteen times per day. That is a tremendous amount of content to generate on a regular basis to attract potential patients and to stay top of mind with your current patient base. 

Posts featuring your doctor(s), educating patients about procedures or treatments you offer, and before-and-after patient photos are commonplace. However, one area that is often overlooked, are posts highlighting your team. 

Creating posts that showcase specific members of your team is an excellent way to keep content fresh and to extend your social media presence. 

Here are just a few reasons why you should consider featuring your team on social media and some examples from practices we think are doing it well.

1 - Recognizing Your Team Can Increase Employee Satisfaction AND Patient Satisfaction

According to Entrepreneur magazine, employee recognition lowers turnover, increases employee happiness, increases employee engagement, and increases trust.

With social media, recognizing your team and sharing accolades is easy. 

You can highlight a specific team member, maybe on his or her work anniversary, birthday, on a day that celebrates their contributions like National Doctors Day (March 30) or National Nurses Day (May 12). 

Austin Weston, The Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Reston, Virginia commemorated National Nurses Day, with Instagram posts profiling all of their nurses. 

Not only will your team appreciate being recognized, but when you highlight the talented people working with you, you might find your patient satisfaction scores rising as well. 

According to Mark Somol, founder of Zeal and an expert in employee metrics, “Employees who are passionate about their workplace are typically much more highly engaged. Passionate and engaged employees are your best customer advocates. Research shows that companies with very high levels of employee engagement can have 3x higher customer satisfaction ratings.”

You might worry about remembering every team member’s birthday. Luckily, social media platforms have scheduling either built-in or available as a third-party app like Hootsuite. Edgard Izaguirre, brand manager for Austin-Weston, The Center for Cosmetic Surgery, plans their social media campaigns for the entire quarter. “Things can be tweaked, but it’s better to be planned in advance,” he says. With these tools, employee appreciation posts can easily be scheduled for the entire year all at once.

2 - Posts Featuring Your Staff Almost Always Garner Higher Engagement

Posts highlighting team members consistently have a higher level of engagement on social media platforms. 

Compare these two Facebook posts by Brinton Vision, in St. Louis, Missouri. 

The first is a classic social media post that advertises their services in a creative way:

4 - Build a Social Media Army by Turning Your Employees Loose 

Satisfied patients are fantastic evangelists, but even the most satisfied patients will be thinking about your practice only occasionally. On the other hand, your staff members are thinking about the practice’s success (hopefully) every day. 

FastCompany advises “Simply encouraging employees to share their company’s social media updates–when done properly–can dramatically expand a company’s total following, extending the reach and impact of its messages.” 

Every “social reaction”, “like” and “share” on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn promotes the social media post in the respective system’s algorithm, resulting in higher rankings and more current and potential patients seeing your messaging.

High-profile brands like Starbucks, Zappos, and Southwest Airlines even train their employees to constantly share their work on social media, with rewards for who can get the most likes, views, and engagement. 

This is not mandatory, of course. FastCompany continues: “To be clear, any employee social media program has to be voluntary. I’d even go a step further than that, however. For this process to work, employees have to actually want to share company news.”

However, it is an easy program to incentivize. You’re not asking for additional time, any more than the five minutes it takes to craft a status update. The occasional $5 Starbucks gift card for the team member with the most liked post this week goes a long way towards incentivizing the kind of behavior that will have immediate tangible effects in generating new prospective patients. 

Word-of-mouth messages from friends and colleagues are widely seen as more relevant and trustworthy than social media blasts from corporate accounts; according to the MSL Group, “Brand messages are shared 24x more frequently when distributed by employees vs brand.”

Think about it yourself: Which car dealership are you more likely to trust? The one running slick Facebook ads in your feed? Or the one where your cousin Debbie works, that she’s always talking about (positively) online? Naturally, you’d lean to the second choice.

Final Thoughts

You’ve always known that your team is the most indispensable asset By showcasing them in your social media posts, you are inviting potential patients to preview an integral part of their experience with your practice. You’re overcoming mental barriers to treatment by presenting relatable people. And you’re allowing your team to speak directly with more credibility than your official pages ever could have.