Social media is a must in any business today, and certainly for an elite facial surgery practice. It is beneficial for the surgeon who has an established practice and more so for the evolving practice.

In this chapter we recommend several social media avenues that have proven to be effective. First, however, we address the message a facial surgeon should be communicating with prospective patients, regardless of the methods.

An old marketers’ saying deserves repeating here: “Features tell; benefits sell!”

Messaging involves more than discussing facial features. For example, consider the statement “During the procedure, your nose will be reduced in size.” This message does not elicit an emotion. It requires more, such as addressing the benefits of having a procedure performed. Statements like these will go a long way toward convincing patients that this is something they really want to have: “Your nose will be more in harmony with other features, so that you will feel more confident.” Or for patients above the age of 40, you might say, “People will notice how much younger you look with fewer sags and wrinkles.” For any facial enhancement procedure, you might say, “When you exude more confidence in yourself, others will have more confidence in you.” Describing the benefits of the procedure in your patient’s life and what it will do for their morale, confidence, and overall emotional wellbeing is much stronger than just identifying the features you are qualified to enhance.

Next, we address the social media platforms that we believe provide the most benefit to your practice.

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Facebook

The number one choice is no surprise here—Facebook. As a facial surgeon you should have a business page (in addition to whatever personal page you have) on Facebook, one specifically designed for your practice. Here you can list your hours of operation and locations and provide some basic information about your services, especially a link back to your practice Web site.

It is important to remember that Facebook is a social media site and you must learn to be “social” on it. That doesn’t mean that you should spend hours on end engaging prospective patients here. You should make your page in keeping with that of a professional, but also fun and memorable.

There are two types of postings that should be included on your business Facebook page. An example of something fun is, maybe, every Tuesday your marketing person posts a picture of a famous person’s eyes and your followers guess to whom the eyes belong. Then the following day, your marketing person posts the eyes, along with the entire face (same picture the eyes came from) side by side, as well as the correct answer.

Each famous person depicted should be someone who is generally thought of as a handsome man or a beautiful woman. Your pictures don’t have to single out eyes though. Maybe the next week your marketing person picks a different person and instead of the eyes, the chin is shown, or maybe the mouth or nose. This may not sound like it pertains to your practice, but it does.

With each series of posts, you are sending subliminal messages to your followers. Showing perfect or near perfect features of famous people draws your followers’ attention to their own features, for comparison.

Another kind of post might be a short (3- to 5-minute) video that teaches your audience something. The focus could be on answering frequently asked questions, at least in the beginning. That would transition into having your audience ask questions for you to answer. You must be very careful not to give specific advice in such a public setting. You can invite patients who wish specific advice to contact you directly. You should also have—and promote—a link that goes back to your site. Ask your followers to like your video and share it with their friends.

You or a member of your marketing team needs to post something at least weekly to keep your audience entertained. This may be answers to commonly asked questions, discussing new technologies or treatments, or simply providing general tips to help keep your clients looking their best. The key is consistency so that people know to anticipate and look for your post.

Share your professional page with all of your friends. It is a quick way to get some likes. When your friends see your posts they can like them and also share them, which then leads to a blossoming (or ripple) effect and elicits more views. The other way to get likes and visualization of your post is to pay for it. This method is faster and easier, but it costs money.

You can also highly select the audience that you want based on demographics, although this does add to the cost of marketing. Once you have the likes, you can then begin marketing to people who have already liked your page. This focuses your dollars on those already interested in your services, which makes the return on investment higher.

YouTube

YouTube postings take advantage of videos you have already recorded and performed—the same ones you used for Facebook. Different social media sites have different audiences. That this is true allows you to reach different demographics by repurposing the same content to several locations.

Make sure you include a description of the video’s content and include the link to your practice Web site at the top of the description. It needs to be at the top of the description because when people view your YouTube video, they only see a very small part of the description. Viewers must expand the description section to see everything written there. Including the link back to your Web site at the top of the description ensures each viewer will see it immediately.

Besides the fact that YouTube is the second or third largest Internet search engine, it is also owned by Google.