be adaptable and learn how to best market for whatever industry you’re in, including the eye care industry.
Social media can help optometrists, ophthalmologists and eye care specialists find new patients, keep current patients, build a positive reputation within their community and help build relationships. And since more than half of people use social media when deciding where to take their business, it’s important to have an engaging presence across multiple social channels.
If you’re thinking about taking your first steps as an eye care social media manager, follow these steps to build a foundation for a fun and rewarding career:
1. LEARN AND UNDERSTAND THE PLATFORMS
2. DEVELOP A BRAND IDENTITY
3. UTILIZE TOOLS MADE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
4. CREATE A REALISTIC PLAN
5. BE ENGAGING AND ENGAGE
6. KEEP UP WITH TRENDS
7. MONITOR METRICS AND BE PREPARED TO ADAPT
8. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RISKS
What used to be Myspace has now become Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, just to name a few. Jumping onto social media to promote your personal brand can be daunting but creating business profiles for your practice is a whole other task.
The first step to becoming an eye care social media manager is understanding the available platforms and which are suitable for your practice. There are seven main social media platforms today that you should consider being on.
You should also have a strong understanding of your social media campaigns. Looking at analytics and being able to see patterns and trends that you can use to better understand your audience and market to them more successfully.
You don’t need to be on every platform. We recommend only choosing the platforms that fit your business. It’s better to choose two platforms and focus on doing them well rather than trying to be on every platform.
Decide which platforms you feel confident you can manage and which fits your brand identity best. Not sure what a brand identity is? Take a look at step number 2!
Creating a solid brand identity for your eye care practice is essential for building a recognizable and relatable presence on social media. Your brand identity should reflect everything from the colours you use to the voice and tone of your captions.
Brand identity also allows you to build stronger relationships with your customers. When you have a strong and distinct way of communicating with your clients, they may choose you over your competition, especially if they think that your values align with theirs. When crafting your brand identity, think about what makes your practice unique and how you want to be perceived by your audience. Use this information to guide your choices and ensure that your brand identity is consistent across your social media platforms.
With a strong brand identity, you’ll be able to connect with your audience and build a loyal following. When developing your brand, you should include:
You don’t have to do this alone! There are so many tools available for you to use to help manage your practice’s social media. Everything from creating images to finding hashtags.
Don’t try to do everything manually, on your own. Utilize these tools to make it easier and more efficient. Some of our favourite tools are:
Canva is a fantastic online tool that offers more than just free stock photos. Even without any prior graphic design experience, you can use it to create graphic design content. Canva offers templates and resources for:
 Facebook Posts
 Instagram Posts
 Logos
 Colour Palettes
On the social media management tool Later, you can schedule and plan posts on your eye care social media platforms.
Additionally, it provides analytics so that you can make sense of your data and take appropriate action. You can create weekly time slots, bulk-schedule posts, and schedule your posts using the calendar’s drag-and-drop functionality.
A great option for social media managers looking for an allin-one tool that integrates with a variety of social networks is Hootsuite. The entry-level packages offer access to the platform for publishing and monitoring social media content at reasonable prices. Hootsuite integrates with:
 Facebook
 Instagram
 LinkedIn
 YouTube
 Pinterest
 Twitter
Lightroom combines photo management and photo editing into a single tool. It can assist you in importing, organizing, managing, and finding images.
If you’re looking for stock images and vectors you can use for your social posts, check out this blog post!
Whether you want to grow your following or create a more active community, defining your social goals is the first step toward achieving them.
In any case, your goals will determine your social media marketing strategy and the amount of time and energy you’ll need to devote to your campaigns. Some examples of goals you may have for your eye care practice:
• Increase Brand Awareness
• Generate New Clients
• Grow Your Practice’s Audience
• Hubspot found that pages under 10,000 fans experienced a 50% drop in engagement per post if they posted more than once daily.
• For optimal page activity, post 2-3 times per week.
• Instagram is constantly evolving, and its algorithm changes quite often. Our number one tip is if Instagram comes out with a new feature, use it!
• For optimal page activity, post a minimum of 3 times per week.
• The more you post, the more likely your content will be seen by unique accounts. With that said, creating TikToks can be quite timeconsuming, and it’s not recommended you spend all day creating 3 TikToks a day.
• The more you can post, the better. Aim for 3 times per week.
Don’t commit to a content schedule that you can’t keep. You are not a content creator; don’t expect to be able to post a reel every day plus ten stories, a TikTok and go live on Facebook. Be realistic with your time.
Being consistent and deliberate is better than posting content for the sake of posting. Below are basic guidelines for how frequently you should post, but please remember consistency and quality over sporadic and quantity.
• It’s easy for your tweets to get lost in the high frequency of tweets. Make sure what you’re posting is deliberate and engaging.
• To avoid getting buried in other content, post at least once a day.
• Pinterest will reward original content before repinning other content. Therefore it can be very timeconsuming. Don’t be afraid to mix in your pins while repinning others.
• Aim to pin a mixture of original content and repins 5-10 times per day
• YouTube takes the most time as you need to create thoughtprovoking, engaging videos. They also need to be recorded at a high quality for your audience to take you seriously.
• Commit to a YouTube posting schedule. For example, once a week, every Wednesday. If that’s too much for you, consider posting on the 1st and 15th of every month.
• LinkedIn is a great place to connect with business professionals. People on LinkedIn are busy like you and likely not looking to connect daily. This requires less commitment and time.
• At a minimum, post 2 times per week but less than 5 times per week.
After understanding how much time you need for each platform, you should be able to decide which platforms you can dedicate your time to.
Remember, you don’t need to sign up for every single one. Think about which ones suit your brand identity best and the ways you want to engage with your clients.
Based on your goals, audience, and brand identity, you should have a good idea of what to post at this point. You’re probably confident in the platforms you’ll cover as well. But now you have to think about how to engage with your audience.
Engagement is a two-way street when it comes to social media. As a business or individual, you need to give your audience a reason to follow you, but you also need to engage with them on their content.
Even something as simple as asking a question can boost engagement. Clients can be your best supporters, but only if you give them something to engage with.
Great engaging content will get your audience’s attention, but engaging with them on their content will solidify the relationship. Don’t be afraid to like, comment and share your followers’ content.
Engaging with their content shows that you’re interested in more than just promoting your practice and value their thoughts and opinions. When done right, engagement will lead to more followers, customers, and success for your practice.
Part of managing social media is being adaptable to the changing environment it provides. Marketing is a fastpaced industry, and social media moves faster every day. When you see a trend that fits your brand identity, jump on it immediately! A trend can be gone within days, and a new one has already replaced it. Social media is always changing.
As a social media manager, you might be thinking: “How do I keep track of everything that’s changing and still have time to do my job?” a few tips we can offer include:
CREATE A TWITTER STREAM WITH POPULAR SOCIAL MEDIA HASHTAGS LIKE #SOCIALMEDIA, #MKTDIGITAL, AND #INBOUNDMARKETING
LISTEN TO SOCIAL MEDIA PODCASTS
MAKE LISTS OF INFLUENCERS IN THE EYE CARE INDUSTRY
CHECK OUT SOCIAL MEDIA BLOGS
SEE WHAT'S TRENDING ON THE INSTAGRAM EXPLORE TAB
Being adaptable is a key component of managing social media. You might see something working for another account and implement it into your own, but after looking at your metrics, you notice it hasn’t had the same effect on your audience. Now it’s time to adapt and change up your strategy or plan.
You’ll never know how one campaign performed compared to another unless you constantly analyze your efforts. A bird’s-eye view of your social media activity can help you put things into perspective. This means reviewing your best-performing content and adjusting your campaigns when your content plateaus.
Every social platform offers its own form of analytics or performance metrics. Take note of what metrics are essential for your practice to be measuring. Some great examples are:
•Engagement Rate
•Impressions
•Clicks
•Followers
•Conversion Rate
•Accounts Reached
You don’t have to track every metric, but you need to track something! Take a look at your practice goals with social media. You might track impressions or accounts reached to bring awareness to your practice.
If you want solid leads and customers in the door, you will want to look at clicks and conversion rates. Your goals might not be the same for every platform, and it’s important to note which metrics you will track for each.
There’s no denying that much of social media is trial and error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time allows you to make minor adjustments to your social media marketing strategy rather than making significant, time-consuming changes.
We are living in an era of experimentation because the online audience is constantly searching for new, intriguing, and unique content. Social media managers can now start being more innovative, taking more chances, and discovering what works and, sometimes, what doesn’t.
Social Media platforms have evolved their algorithms to reward creative and original accounts. Don’t be afraid to take risks and create content that hasn’t been seen before, if you’re not taking the risks, someone else will. As great as it is to recreate content and hop on a trend, sometimes it’s better if you make something unique and original, after all, trends have to start from somewhere.