It’s easy to get on Instagram, but to stand above the other physicians, you need to play your A game. Here are a few tips and tricks beyond the basics.
Highlights
These are the small circles that live just below your bio. While stories only stay live for 24 hours, highlights allow you to permanently archive them in albums as a fixture of your account. More importantly, they help categorize and organize your archived stories. The possibilities are almost endless, but keep in mind each highlight’s name can’t be longer than 16 characters. Here are some ways to categorize your highlights:
- By type, such as Before & After, Tips & Tricks, Behind the Scenes or “BTS”, Dr. John Doe (if your practice has multiple physicians that are featured on the account), testimonials or event name
- By treatment area, such as face (or even more specific like eyes and jawline), scalp, neck or abdomen
- By procedure type, such as injectables, lasers, skin cancer, body contouring or skin care
- By specific procedure, such as neuromodulators, fillers, CoolSculpting, chemical peels or Mohs surgery
Custom Highlight Covers
Design each highlight circle – called a “cover” – with an icon or color to match your brand. The highlight covers should all be cohesive, easy to understand and only a visual icon since the text is written below. For example, your “Eyes” highlight could include a silhouette of the eye or an event could use the event logo.
Bio
Your “about me” can be up to 150 characters in length, and you should utilize every space they allow. Be creative and play around with the wording before publishing it to your profile. You can include emojis and hashtags with keywords like #BoardCertified or #dermatology.
Call to Action
Make sure the “click to call and email” functions are set up and working properly. You can also add a “make an appointment” button. Use the same phone number that you list on every other website to support search engine optimization (SEO).
Live vs. Stories vs. Feed
Ideally, you should post equally on your stories and feed, and go live as often as possible. An easy solution is to add a teaser to your story every time you publish a new feed post. This will entice followers to visit your profile. Use live primarily to demonstrate procedures or host a question and answer session.
Direct Messages (DMs) and Comments
Respond as close to real time as possible. If best practice for email inquiries is 20 minutes or less, then for Instagram it should be half that! You should respond to every single comment even if you can tell it is a bot (more about those later). Interaction is key — this is “social” media!
Be Social
Follow local influencers, colleagues, brands, businesses and professional societies like @ASDSMembers and @ASDSSkinMD. Spend time reviewing posts on your main feed and like, comment and interact as much as possible! You can also share – or “repost” – other accounts. There are dozens of apps that make it quick and easy.
Follower to Following Ratio
There is no need for you to follow more than a few hundred people! Spend time reviewing the accounts you follow to ensure they are all credible and appropriate. Although you may hear about automated software or bots that can help grow your followers quickly, I do not recommend using them. It may seem faster, but in the long run it is well worth it to grow your account the right way by obtaining high-quality followers.
Get Detailed
While each post’s description can include up to 2,200 characters (and 30 hashtags), it will be truncated after 125 and followers will have to click “more” t0 expand the description. Educate followers with a thorough explanation about what and/or who is pictured on all before and after photos and treatment posts. The more information the better! This can include things like the patient’s age, his/her concern(s), treatment plan, anticipated downtime, duration between treatment sessions, amount of time between before and after photo, how long will results last, pain level and specifics about the procedure / technique / device / injectables used. A popular trend is to separate the information so each item is on its own line with a corresponding emoji; this makes it easy for people to digest your content and ensures you will explain all of the details in each post. Although you cannot make line breaks to separate paragraphs, a quick solution is to use punctuation marks or symbols.
Utilize Instagram Features
Instagram has fun features such as boomerangs (short video clips that play forward and in reverse), stickers, animated GIFs, polling, location tags, hashtags and emojis. Incorporate one or more to enhance every post. Finding the right animation or sticker can take time, but once you get some practice using different keywords in the search feature, it will cut down dramatically!
After reading this, you might havequestions about the time investment. The popular physicians on Instagram will spend at least an hour or two each day managing their accounts. Some may also have their own full-time, in-house staff to help with video content, capturing photos, filming live footage during procedures, creating graphics and writing posts. Either way, the top performing physicians on Instagram are all managing it themselves at some level. Although a digital marketing agency can oversee and drive the campaign and do the majority of the leg work, the ideal physician / practice Instagram account will include a healthy dose of your own personality from you being personally involved!