How Can Social Media Fit Into Podiatric Practice?

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
Welcome back to Podiatry Today Podcasts. I'm Dr. Jennifer Spector, the Assistant Editorial Director for Podiatry Today. We are honored once again to have as our guest Dr. Melissa Lockwood, this time speaking about her experience with social media and podiatric practice. Dr. Lockwood is a Fellow of the American College of Podiatric Medicine and the American Society of Podiatric Surgeons. She is a diplomate of and Vice President of the American Board of Podiatric Medicine, and she practices in Bloomington, Illinois.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
How does social media play into your practice marketing? In your experience, what are the pros and cons of this?

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Social media is an integral part of practice marketing, specifically in a private practice setting because you have to differentiate yourself on as many platforms as you can from these larger hospital groups and conglomerates and things.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Most people don't do social media very well. When I say that, they... Number one, you have to have a separate business page on all of these different platforms. But secondly, it is critical that you make sure that your personal page still stays on the up and up, and that you're not really posting about things that would be deemed in any way inappropriate by anyone. That can be politics, religion, sometimes sports. Although sports is probably my one gray area because my patients all do know that I'm a Chicago Bears fan and they just feel sorry for me. There's that part of it.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
But in either case, you want to make sure that your social media presence on the business side does still reflect and be accurate with what you're putting on social media from a personal level. If there's a concern on your end or on any of your associates or anything on that front, the better play is to not have a personal page at all and to just focus on the business page if you have to.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
With that said, we are finding and we're seeing... Our ideal patient, again, remember I said female between 25 and 55. She's living in two places right now. She's either on Facebook, which it's starting to taper a little away from there but it's still pretty predominant. Then she's also living currently on Instagram. We do have social media channels for... We have a TikTok channel. I'm looking at my husband and smiling because he's in the room as well. Because he's the one that's the ruler of our TikTok. We don't do that much because it's not our ideal patient. Then we also have a LinkedIn page for the business and we have a Pinterest board, which hasn't been as fruitful as we once though it would be.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
In all of these platforms, there's specific tips and tricks that you can do, but the point is to be consistent about it. We figure out a theme every month. The month of May, for example, was all about our buy one... It was all about Doctor's Remedy nail polish and fungal nails and we had the BOGO sale on the Doctor's Remedy and we really tried to promote that for the entire month.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
This upcoming month, it continues with summer and summer nails. We're talking more about the fungal laser. We'll go back into orth- We kind of cycle through each quarter of our top three things we want to see. Which are warts for the swift treatment, heel pain for the orthotics, then fungal nails for the fungal lasers. Those are our top three chief complaints and we just rotate through the three.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
There' a lot of nuance and detail when it comes to ad spend, if you're trying to get out there and actually have targeted ads. Both Facebook and Instagram do a pretty good job of helping you differentiate and you can pick out who your ideal patient is. I will say that is something that we even farm out. We don't even do our own ad spend in-house. We definitely have an outside company that helps us with that. Because the time that it takes to be able to analyze where these ads are going and who they're seeing and where the ROI is coming from with it, it's a little above my pay grade. I will say that. I'm definitely supposed to be a podiatrist, not a social media guru, so I will share that component.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
There's definitely good opportunities on social media. You need to be consistent, you need to be professional. We track it out each month and then we have themes for... Or I guess trends for each day of the week. Monday is all about our office team members, there's always something. Tuesdays are always a healthy tip. We just talked about iced tea last week. People like that. They want to see the personal stuff. We do a foot fact on our Fridays. I'm trying to think of what else.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
We have a video each week that we're posting about something. We've always got some sort of educational video that we're putting up there. Then once a month, we actually do a little parody music video on different types of foot problems and things. I'll do a shameless plug. If anybody wants to see the Heartland Foot and Ankle YouTube page, I'm sometimes in the videos. I am not the star of those videos. That is my husband and, to a lesser extent, my children.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
It's a family affair, right?

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Well, I'm like on the outskirts. I'm usually relegated to production assistance, so yes.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
You made an interesting comment before where you said that you're supposed to be the podiatrist. I think a lot of docs feel that way. They say, "I'm not a social media, I'm not a content creator, I'm not a marketer."

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
How do I handle some of this? I think the question a lot of docs may have is how do you handle the engagement on social media if somebody writes a comment or potentially a review that might be negative or something along those lines? How do you handle that type of engagement and interaction?

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Well, first of all, someone has to do it. It usually is assigned to a team member within our practice. Or in our particular instance, because we do engage with an outside firm, they are also monitoring it. We're very fortunate that we don't typically get not so great reviews or not so great comments.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
However, we do monitor it. My husband has an alert on his phone, I have an alert on my phone that if somebody comments, we just look at it briefly. Like okay, hey, this is fine.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
When it is not good, it is negative, it's very, very important that it's responded to in an appropriate manner and that you really... Whatever the comment is, the standard blanket answer of, if it's negative, is, "I am so sorry that your experience didn't meet our expectations. Please allows us to earn your service back and we will be contacting you privately."

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
That way, you look like the better person no matter what you do, what you say. You have to have somebody in charge of responding for it. Ultimately, in the private practice setting, it's myself or my husband that are just monitoring it over weekends and nights, but we do have someone looking at it during the day.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
That being said, what one thing do you think that DPMs can do today to improve their overall practice marketing?

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
I think figuring out who your ideal patient is, number one. If you know who you want to see, that's going to help figure out exactly where you want to market. That can be on social media, it can be print advertising, it can be just an improvement on your website or your blogs or anything like that. It can be any of those things. But you have to know who that ideal patient is.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
It really comes down to what do you want to see and who do you want to take care of? That's just all it is. If you don't like wounds, you honestly... You should take wound care off of your website. If you don't want to see them, don't have it on there. We did that. We were like, "You know what? I don't love seeing those types of patients." Not that we won't, we will. It's just I'm not marketing to them, I'm not advertising to them.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
The same thing goes for we used to really attend some really well promoted and well attended senior expos and things like that. It's not that those patients aren't welcome and that we wouldn't want to see them. But they're not my ideal patient any longer, so we no longer spend the time and effort to go to those events because we're trying to garner our patients elsewhere.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
Is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners today?

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
I think just start small because it's going to be very overwhelming. If you don't currently have a website that has been updated within the last three years... Ours was just updated three years ago and we are updating it. If it hasn't been updated since before COVID, you need an updated website. That's the number one thing.

Melissa Lockwood, DPM:
Then the secondary component would be then you can dabble in all this other extra stuff. We're pretty crazy over here. I will share that. Definitely start small. But look at other practices for inspiration and know that everybody is really just out there to help take care of people. It's not about who's seeing what as long as you're seeing what you want to be seeing.

Jennifer Spector, DPM:
We want to extend our thanks to Dr. Lockwood for being with us again on today's episode. Make sure you tune into her previous episode, where she spoke even more in-depth on practice marketing. You can listen to this episode and many others on Spreaker.com, PodiatryToday.com, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Spotify.