Search Engine Listings & Social Media Are Necessary!

This is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants, and I have a tip for you. I should say it this way, social media, social media, social media. That's all we hear about, is social media, but it's important that you start to do something as far as social media is concerned.

You see, right now, of the people that are not therapists that are professionals, healthcare professionals, they probably get 30% to 50% of their new patients a lot of them from the Internet, but a therapist is probably going to get between 50% and 80% of their new patients from the Internet. Now, that would include places like Psychology Today and other places too, but the Internet is very important for you, so what do you have to do?

Well, first of all, you have to do. I'll just give you a list of some things you have to do. Number one, you have to be listed and complete on all search engines, especially Google, Bing, Yelp and Yahoo. If you get complete on those and what I mean by complete, you have to give them your hours. You have to tell them if English is your only language. You have to tell them if you're a disability able, so that’s ADA compliant. You have to tell them what your office hours are. You have to tell them what niches you have and you have to be very complete on all these search engines, because think about this. Let's say Google, you're 40% complete, and this therapist is 100% complete. Which one are they going to show? They're going to show the one that's 100% complete. Go through all four big search engines, Google, Bing, Yelp and Yahoo, and make sure that you filled in all the blanks. They'll even tell you, you're 83% complete. Make sure you go through those and get on all the search engines.

The next thing you have to do is you got to get on all the social media sites. Now, the two big ones are Facebook and Instagram. I don't know if you know this, but Facebook owns Instagram. Instagram is basically for people that are 35 years and younger and Facebook is for people that are 35 years and older so you really have to advertise on both areas. You have to have social media activity on both areas, which means you're going to do posts, you're going to boost those posts, you're going to advertise on social media. You have all those things that you have to do to make sure that you get to the top and then you got to get reviews. Then you got to get reviews. Now, if that sounds like a lot to do, and I've only touched the surface of what you really should be doing, I should tell you that we have a program called the Internet Presence Program, and we do all this for you. It's done for your marketing. We have a lot of therapists who just say, "Do my marketing." We have about four telephone or video meetings with them, we decide what they want to do, and then we take their social media, their internet presence, we run with it and it takes about three months to get it fully implemented. It takes about a year to get up to the top, but you'll see that you'll do really well if you would join us with your social media and with your Internet presence. If you want to do it on your own, just do the things we talked about there.

Get on all the search engines, Google, Bing, Yelp and Yahoo. Get on Facebook and Instagram, at least, of social media. You can also get on other ones. You can get on Twitter, you can get on LinkedIn, it depends on who you want to contact that way. Either way, whether we do it for you or you do it yourself, you got to get your internet presence going. You got to make it big and powerful.