What’s The Best Way To Communicate With You?#Socialnomics 2014

As we cross over into 2015 it’s rather common thing for people to engage and use social media. What do you use social media for? Is it your research tool? Or perhaps a tool to chat with friends? Find a movie location? To promote your new book? Find new recipes? People use it for a multitude of reasons. So this begs the question…what do we use it for here at OSI Physical Therapy? Well, the answer is fairly simple: 1) We want to monitor what people are saying about or to us, 2) Send people in the right direction to get help, 3) Provide meaningful content useful to the visitors.

One of the things we try to do here at OSI is continue to offer patients a seamless experience while going through physical therapy. With that said, knowing that 50% of the world’s population is under the age of 30 it’s important to stay active in trying to find the best and most relevant ways to communicate with people interested in OSI in 2015.

Here are the three basic uses we find social media to be most helpful for us at OSI:

1) Monitoring Your Brand

Social media has been a remarkable way for businesses to further their reach and achieve better visibility and awareness. An important part of this process is paying attention to what people are saying about your brand online. This can seem overwhelming, but there are tools businesses can use to simplify this process and enable them to watch for brand engagement online. In this process of ‘reputation management’ it’s important to not only respond to and be grateful for compliments about patient experiences, but also to watch for and address patient complaints. It’s absolutely critical in this day and age to monitor this. Many people see social media as a fast way to vent their frustration and they hold increasingly higher expectations. For example, 72% of people who complain on Twitter expect a response from the brand within 1 hour (via Hubspot).

2) Providing Help

At OSI, we also use social media as a tool to answer industry questions and send people in the right direction for getting help. Many times we receive detailed questions about pain management, preventative tips, healthy lifestyles, and even work related injuries. We are quick to try to get people the right information or get them connected to the right person. We have dozens of specialists at OSI and offer a free phone consultation to patients who prefer to ask a physical therapist some questions first before they commit to making an appointment. Social media has be a method for people to contact us and bypass a phone call or website visit to get what they need.

3) Meaningful Content

Another way we like to use social media is to disseminate content through our social media accounts. We like to create and provide our own meaningful content to pass along to patients and website visitors. As we continue to receive a lot of questions about our services, it tends to serve as a compass to the types of things people want to read more about. That helps us create an editorial calendar for items our physical therapists, athletic trainers and general staff write content for. What we have learned in this process is that there are large numbers of people our there who an alternative to non-invasive surgeries or long term medications as their solution. Physical therapy can be a significantly cheaper alternative with even better results.