Facebook 'Dos and Don'ts' for Your Medical Practice

If you use Facebook to market your practice's services, you may have noticed that it has effectively reduced business pages' post visibility. I have seen more businesses and medical practices begin to utilize their personal accounts to try and bridge that gap. That is not a good idea, for many reasons. Here's why you should make sure your business page and personal page are always kept separate:

1. Facebook's user-terms don't allow mixing personal and business accounts.  You are better off following their rules, on their platform. You may find yourself with a cancelled account for violating Facebook's Terms of Service if you are utilizing one of the "personal profiles" strictly for business promotion.

2. You may reach the "friend" ceiling. Your business page allows unlimited fans to "like" it and see your content. A personal page however is capped at 5,000 friends. Many clients say, "But I can transfer them." You can try that, but it has been my experience that on a page with 5,000 friends less than 200 end up completing the transfer. It would be a shame to lose all of those friends.

3. Personal pages lack analytics. Personal pages don't offer the analytics that Facebook's business pages offer. And if you are not measuring and examining what is effective in your efforts to market your practice, then you are doing yourself a disservice.

4. Business pages provide inexpensive advertising. The very problem that most people and practices have with Facebook is also what makes it so great. Extremely targeted and frankly cheap advertising. You won't find any other advertising source (outside of social media) that will allow you to drill down into specifics about your ideal patient more than Facebook.

5. You may turn off your IRL friends (in real life). Friends and family want to support you so they may try to put up with your constant promotion; but in reality polls show that they just want to see pictures of your outings, puppies, kids, and things of a personal nature. It is okay to occasionally share something from your practice's page, but try to maintain a professional separation.

What is a practice to do? Easy! Save your personal page for your IRL friends and get your business page together for your practice. You will be glad you did!