Utilizing Social Media for Patient Education and Engagement in Rehab

Everybody knows social media isn’t just for sharing cool pics and statuses with friends anymore. Today, these platforms have evolved into crucial tools to reach, engage, and educate thousands, if not millions, of people at once. Instagram, TikTok, and even Facebook can be used to spread awareness and important messages regarding serious social topics such as mental health, addiction, and rehab. Whether you’re a doctor, a physical therapist, or involved in any form of rehab services, you should consider harnessing the potential of social media. To help you get started, we’ve compiled all our best tips for utilizing social media for patient education and engagement in rehab.

Optimize Your Accounts

Right after creating social media for your rehab, the first necessary step is to optimize all your accounts. Make sure you put all the necessary information on your profiles, like your contact information and your website. Add headers and profile pictures to make the account look legit. It might seem like an unimportant detail to you. However, younger generations won’t trust social media that looks poorly put together or fake.

While you might find it less important, your social media could be just as crucial to your business as your website, if not more. So, follow your brand guidelines, offer valuable information, and create professional content that reflects your brand in the best possible light. All these little things can add up and help you build a positive reputation for your addiction recovery center.

Set Your Goals

You shouldn’t create social media profiles just for the hell of it. It’s not enough to know you just want to educate and engage. 

If you don’t set more concrete goals for your social media, you’ll lose track of your intentions and start creating content that isn’t cohesive. By focusing your efforts on a single objective, you can make your plan attainable and consistent. The following are some tactics and typical social media objectives:

• Gain More Followers: Gain additional friends, connections, subscribers, followers, and so on as you expand your social media channel.
• Brand Awareness: Increase the number of eyes (i.e., impressions, reach, views, etc.) on your pages.
• Engagement: Encourage your fans to participate in your content by writing comments, sharing posts, retweeting, posting favorable reviews, and so on.
• Conversions: Motivate your audience to make an appointment or obtain more details through sign-ups, lead generation, sales, etc. 

Create Content

After you’ve settled on a goal, it’s time to start sharing valuable information with your audience through your social media. Start by creating posts, videos, infographics, or any other type of content that best suits your goals.

Suppose your first goal is brand awareness. In that case, you can create posts explaining common rehabilitation procedures or struggles patients often face, all through the lens of the personalized services you offer. You can share details about your rehabilitation centers and even testimonials of past satisfied patients to help you build social proof.

On the other hand, if your goal is just patient engagement, you can encourage community participation by sharing options and encouraging active discussions. You can even create interactive challenges or campaigns related to rehab goals. For example, you could start a daily exercise challenge where patients share their workout routines. Or, you could create a nutrition campaign focusing on foods that aid recovery. Use hashtags to track participation and encourage patients to share their progress on social media, fostering a sense of accountability and community support.

Do It Consistently

Finally, whatever you do in this phase, make sure you do it consistently. Giving up after a few posts because they’re not getting enough traction is a bad idea. You’re basically giving up before you even started. So, stay consistent, keep creating, and, over time, you’ll notice your content and your results getting better and better.

Build and Cherish Your Community

While creating content and posting on your social media, it’s easy to get lost in your ideas and forget to check the feedback from your community. This could be a terrible mistake. 
When utilizing social media for patient education and engagement in rehab, it’s important to constantly check the comments and reviews you’re getting. By responding to reviews and comments, you’ll get a better sense of your audience and their thoughts and opinions. Moreover, you’ll show credibility and the ability to take constructive feedback. This will make you even more reputable in the eyes of your audience.

Start Advertising

While paying for advertising isn’t always guaranteed to work, it’s much more likely to give you good results if you’ve already built a reputable, recognizable brand. Advertising without a plan or a set brand can quickly backfire.

For example, if you’re simply investing as much money as possible into Facebook and Instagram ads without thinking about your goals and the content you’re creating, you’re most likely not going to get great results. Instead of getting all the conversions or comments you’re hoping for, you’ll simply tire out your audience and make them start disliking your brand. Just think about the last time you saw the same ad a thousand times again and again. Did you get bored of that brand to the point of hating it? (Hint: Yes, you did.)

Organize Events and Webinars

The great thing about utilizing social media is that, after a point, you can slowly take your audience offline, or at least off social media and onto other platforms. You can start organizing events and webinars that are not strictly on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok and provide a longer, more serious type of education.

You can start holding events where therapists demonstrate exercises, discuss rehabilitation techniques, or conduct informative webinars on relevant rehab topics. These live interactions can allow patients to ask questions in real-time and receive immediate feedback from experts, further educating and fostering your community.

Start Using Social Media for Patient Education and Engagement in Rehab

Utilizing social media for patient education and engagement in rehab isn’t easy, but it can give you great results as long as you’re detailed, informative, consistent, and captivating. Before you start, think about the kind of content that would catch your attention and interest you. Chances are, other people will find it captivating, too!