How Social Media Can Help You Attract Therapy Clients

I recently talked to a therapist who was trying to wrap their mind around the benefits of social media. They couldn’t understand how having friends and followers all over the country could help them attract therapy clients, especially local-to-them clients. After all, social media is global.

So can social media attract local therapy clients? The answer is yes. Social media can help you in big ways when it comes to attracting clients, namely in the areas of building your credibility, helping you with networking, and with SEO and content marketing increasing traffic to your site.

Examples Of How Social Media Helps You Attract Therapy Clients

Social media helps with your online credibility by

• Making you more human. Social media is, well, social. It’s were so many people hang out and spend time. If you’re posting on a regular basis and about things that you care about and that your audience cares about, it makes you seem more real and therefore easier to reach out to
• Providing social proof. If you build a large audience or one that is small but highly engaged, it helps people believe and trust you.

Social media helps with networking by

• Building relationships with referral sources. People love having cool people in their network. If you are consistently on social medai being someone that delivers value,  believes in or advocates for the same types of things, and actively nurtures relationships with people, you can become their go-to for referring clients.
• Landing guest blogging and column-writing opportunities. With a decent social media following, you can write for publications more easily as every media publication that exists has increasing the traffic to their own site in mind. If you approach a media outlet as someone that already has a big audience, that media will be getting both the content you provide and distribution among your audience. They want that!
• Demonstrating your practice’s mission. Social media helps form your identity and the way that others understand who you are. If you’re a solo practice, this can help you get into various local and online professional groups and affiliations. If you are growing a group practice, having a strong identity can help you attract associates or partners.
• Reaching influencers in your field. One of the best audiences to get in front of is someone else’s. Having a solid social media presence can help you get in front of the audience of the local people who have influence over your best fit clients.

Social media has SEO and content marketing benefits by

• Increasing traffic to your website. Social media is a perfect distribution channel for any content that you could be creating and posting to your website.
• Getting your content out there so people link to your site. Social media also leads to those that see your content growing to love it and share it too.

Social Media Also Helps Potential Clients Get To Know, Like, and Trust You

Being on social media helps build the identity to which clients are familiarizing themselves directly prior to reaching out to you.

There’s are SEO benefits, networking benefits, and through being present and engaged on social media, it shows that you are real and gives your potential clients a glimpse into how you care, what you care about, and how you interact with and are respected by others.

And that is huge. And that is what leads to client-attraction and referral-source attraction.

These Will Help You Put Yourself Out There On Social

If you are new to putting yourself out there on social media, then you may be feeling a bit lost on how to get started. Kat Love, the creator of Empathysites, has written two great posts on their blog that might help you out:

Over 50 social media post ideas for therapists for when you don’t know what to post

A Completely free social media content calendar (no email signup form or anything, just click the link and download).

Social Media May Be More Important Than You Think

In a world where many of us carry the internet in our pocket at all times, to be relevant online means you have to be present where people are.

No longer can you just list yourself in the phone book and tell a physician that you’re around. Competition is fierce and many therapists wonder if they are going to be able to build a sustainable practice with so many therapists saturating their area.

One way to stand out for sure is with consistent presence online. Social media can be a powerful way to do that.

What do you think? Are you going to start using social media to put yourself out there?  The power of social media is the type of insight we share in our free emails. If you’d like to get valuable insights in your inbox, we would love to have you subscribe.