Growing A Community Culture With FB Groups

 I want to invite all of you to continue that conversation as I mentioned in Episode 7. When I sat down after there were some requests for more referral content, so I decided to put on a referral workshop on January 19th. This will be a webinar-style and that way you all can show up live and you can ask any questions or follow-ups that you need because you'll be there with me so if you'd like to join for that free referral workshop. 

Tuesday, January 19th at 1:00 p.m CST 

--> Register at the illuminatedsquad.com/referrals.

 Make sure to join our FREE FB group so you don’t miss any announcements about the workshop and can join the rest of the group there! 

I definitely will do something special for those of you that are able to show up live. If you want the content and you're not able to show up live register anyway because we are sending out the replay! 

--> Download the companion guide to this episode: Facebook Group Strategies

So what we already covered on referrals and episode 7 is the concept that I was telling you; when someone is referred to your office to your practice, there are some things that potentially could prevent them from truly deciding to book an appointment. I'm going to transition into if you've covered all those things we discussed previously: your branding is where it needs to be, you're very clear about what sets you apart in your Marketplace, and you have adapted or shifted any of the language in your outward-facing marketing to make sure it's aligned with your ideal demographics. Now, you're ready to truly pour some gas on the fire because if I would have just given you all of these strategies first and you didn't have those things up to par. You potentially could be losing a lot of your referrals, right? This is a new strategy that we implemented at the beginning of 2020 and it has been going well for us; not just from a referral standpoint, but from an overall approach with practice. 

Facebook Groups

Facebook group is something you can implement in your practice in a couple of different ways. So first you would want to decide what type of goals do you have for this Facebook group. 

Do you have more of a community-minded? Put out free information in a Facebook group format to serve my community, make sure they're aware of Natural Health Resources, that kind of thing.

Amplifying the connection? Utilizing this new medium to take that even deeper with patients. 

In our case, we really wanted to develop this as an option for our practice for many reasons, but one of the biggest reasons being we were seeing our deliverability of a lot of the content we put out to help our patients in the grand scope go down. So many of you probably have noticed that your reach on your business page on Facebook on Instagram is going down and it's getting harder and harder. We were well aware that Facebook was favoring group-based content that group content is showing up as far as in our patients' feeds.

So our main goal for the Facebook group was to deepen the connection and to give them more resources and information than we can in a normal office visit; This is just a really great way to pass along information and provide content. We also had a big goal of creating more community amongst our patients. 

Strategy

As we are getting into this Facebook group strategy. I'm going to be sharing some really basic tactical things as well as some higher-level thoughts as to how it's been going. What specifically has worked well for us and what hasn't so I do have a handout for you in conjunction with this episode as well that's going to break down the majority of what I am talking to you about today. 

1. Determine who will be the admin of this group. So who is going to help you monitor the content and make sure that conversations are appropriate? There are lots of considerations when it comes to making sure you're curating the content and it's truly a healthy safe place. So just make sure that you're spending some time looking at those group settings and talking to your team about who can help.
2. Give them a compelling reason to join. We told all of our patients there was going to be exclusive VIP patient information inside this group and we also ran a contest. 
3. Determine the best mediums to get patients into your group. 
1. Texting: We use a texting system in the office called Zingit. We added a custom portion of text to the bottom of our appointment reminders to let them know in the first few months. So every time they were getting an appointment reminder text. There was some reminder at the bottom that they could jump into the Facebook group that was exclusive for patients. 
2. Email List: You really want to do your best to be building an email list so that you can communicate not only with patients but also with prospects as well. This is another thing if you're sending out emails regularly you want to include an invitation to join this group. This is one of the biggest reasons why ideally in your email system you should have a separate list of your patients so that you can if you wanted to you can just send a specific email to your active people. 
3. Facebook Ads and mailers: Utilize both to have other community members join the group and learn more about your practice.
4.  Commit to the group: Consistently post so that they're seeing the activity and they're being prompted to engage. So I would suggest that you come up with some sort of posting schedule;  for us, we learned really quickly that ideally, it was best to just have one particular person that was responsible for the schedule. So we collaborated together as docs and with our team for the content early on but then one of our docs was responsible for doing the posting so we didn't get jumbled. 
1. Choose Topics: So the categories that you pick for content should speak to and talk to the primary goals that you have for the group. 

Engagement 

First and foremost, obviously, most of you at this point know that there are two different types of consumers when it comes to content; there are readers and there are watchers. Don’t discount videos or making sure that you have some long form educational posts in there that are written out or you're sharing handouts again that maybe they've seen way back when in their journey and your office those are important too. Schedule and if possible if you can upload video content with captions those are really helpful because obviously a lot of people watch video content without sound. 

Then when you're considering your content categories, make sure that you include some things that are strictly just for engagement, and what I mean by that is some easy questions or easy things to interact about that they feel called to just answer - so like a quick poll about cooking or a recipe or something. I mean, you have to consider your demographic. So for us, we are mainly talking to stressed out moms in their late 20s to late 40s is pretty much our demographic. Include funny memes, pure humor things, polls about life, etc. Those are the types of things that they're used to seeing in their feed. So it's easy for them to engage and it lightens it up and it gives them an opportunity to feel like this is a place to talk and not just consume. Things that aren't always super educationally heavy you got to diversify your content and then from there, we asked a few of our Chiro evangelist patients to be ambassadors in the group. Just meaning, if you love this certain thing that you're doing to help organize your week with kids schedule and your schedule, can you share that in the Facebook group or if you have your kids going to a new activity that is that you're really loving as a family shares those recipes. 

It's really important for you as we're closing out this episode to think about what's the information that your existing patients need to know in order to refer more effectively. So how can you brainstorm the types of conversations that they're encountering in their life and give them some content inside this group to know how to navigate those sensations much easier. 

“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen heard and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship”. - Brene Brown