By By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO
ROCKVILLE, Md.—If you are feeling compelled to use social media to market your business, chances are you are not alone.
It's no surprise the first thing that pops into mind when starting out on the social media marketing route is
Facebook. A community with over 700 million members, it's an internet unto itself, and most of your customers are acting within it. No surprise it can be important to have a presence there, and knowing how to have an active and effective presence is important to your marketing success within this platform.
I've coined Glazier's "6 C's to Facebook Marketing." The first and by far the most important "C" is Creating Content. No one who visits your business page wants to see you begging for likes, talking about your cat or posting stuff that is obviously self-promotional. Think about how you feel when you see things like that. What people want is interesting content, content that adds value to their lives.
Instead of directly promoting your products and services, post about the latest clinical advances, tell your Facebook fans about how to accessorize more effectively or tell them about the charity you support. Creating content that is funny and/or compelling around your business which adds value to the lives of your fans makes them appreciate your social media efforts and causes them to "share" your content, which drives more people toward your page, enhancing awareness of your brand.
The most frequent comment I hear is that creating compelling content is challenging, and that is not surprising due to the fact that we are eyecare professionals, not marketing experts. Many people throw their hands up and comment they don't have "time", when the reality is they have feelings of inadequacy surrounding marketing. While social media has helped me discover a passion for marketing, I'm a practicing clinician with limited time to create content, which is why I use a free service provided by
AllAboutVision.com that populates my Facebook page with interesting content when I don't have the time to.
AllAboutVision.com's Facebook updates are helpful, informative and cover a broad swath of the information your Facebook fans want to learn about. They are published weekly and are regularly dependable, and add depth to your social media marketing effort through Facebook. Here are examples of two recent posts from their service.
Eyecare practitioners can take advantage of AllAboutVision.com Facebook updates by visiting
www.allaboutvision.com/ecp for instructions on how to apply the Facebook feed for your page, or you can let them do it instead of trying to figure it out by choosing the "click here to learn more" option on the right side of the page. Thanks to AllAboutVision.com for this helpful service and their amazing platform which helps the public and doctors as well.
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Alan N. Glazier, OD, FAAO is the founder/CEO of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care in Rockville, Md. A search and social optimization consultant, he is a regular contributor to CLICK and also writes a regular blog for
SightNation.com. A founder of ODs on Facebook, Glazier is also a VM/ROB Optometric Business Innovator. Glazier is at
aglazier@youreyesite.com and his regular posts can be found via his Twitter handle: @EyeInfo, his blog:
youreyesite.net and his website:
YourEyeSite.com. He's the founder and moderator of ODs on Facebook and author of
Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0
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