Generally speaking, when podiatrists and other healthcare providers post to their Facebook page, they don't get much engagement and they don't get the results that they're looking for ie new patients. These days, a few comments, shares, or likes don't catch the attention of Facebook's algorithm and unfortunately Facebook therefore doesn't show the post to many people who follow your page. In other words, organic reach is dead.
So how do your get your message to be shown to potential patients?
The answer, of course, is to run Facebook ads because when you do, they can reach whoever you want to reach including the types of people who are likely to be in need of podiatry or any healthcare service. There is a proven and effective approach to this and you can read about it here.
So does that mean that when you run Facebook ads you should stop posting to your wall? Absolutely not, you should continue posting to your wall and here's why:
Facebook does not look at ads in isolation. They look at everything to do with your ads which are running, including your ad account quality score, your bidding strategy, who is competing for the same ad space, and your page engagement.
Each time you run an ad, you may or may not be aware, it goes into an auction to compete against other advertisers who are looking to advertise in that exact same ad space ie in people's news feeds. As part of that, Facebook looks at how much engagement there is on different advertiser's Facebook pages.
So that if Clinic A has no engagement on their Facebook page and their running ads to an audience and Clinic B also runs an ad to that same audience but has lots of engagement on their page, Facebook is going to favour showing the ad to the target audience of the clinic with the page with lots of engagement.
So therefore, if you want your ads to win the auction against your competitors, it is vital that you continue to post on your Facebook page.
As a second to that, if someone who has never heard of your clinic is needing help but has never heard of you before and sees your ad for the first time, they will likely check out your Facebook page. If there's no regular posts or engagement on the page, they're not going have much confidence in you being able to help them. Of course you can, but they don't know that.
So that's why you should continue posting to your Facebook page when you're running ads. And when you run ads, you can generate patient leads so you can serve more patients and grow your clinic.
