New Facebook Features and Your Fan Page
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Facebook held their annual f8 conference in San Francisco last week, and unveiled some major upcoming changes to their site. Along with a visual redesign and new Timeline feature, they also announced deeper levels of integration to engage users within the Facebook site. Instead of your patients passively declaring what they “like,” the new Facebook will encourage active participation by promoting the more engaging posts to the top of your patients’ news feeds. We’ve already started seeing this on our own profiles, as the application from Spotify (which keeps our San Francisco office rocking until 9pm on most nights) is constantly sharing with us what music our friends are listening to. But, aside from providing a new soundtrack for your waiting room, what does this mean to your practice?
The one topic noticeably missing from the conference was what effect these new changes would have on the feature of Facebook used most by many practices – the Facebook Fan Page. With Facebook now displaying posts in patients’ news feeds based on relevance, there has been wide speculation that this will reduce the visibility of Fan Page posts. While we certainly don’t expect Fan Pages to be abandoned by Facebook, it does appear that they’ve taken a backseat to social engagement between users in Facebook’s current plans. Since the next step in the evolution of Facebook is heavily emphasizing this user-to-user interaction, it stands to reason that the best way to find your way into the news feeds of prospective patients is to have those posts come directly from their friends – not a Fan Page.
The best part about this approach is that it lightens your own workload. Instead of spending your own time working to promote your practice on Facebook via your Fan Page, let your patients do the work for you! Just like the old-fashioned word-of-mouth referrals that have been bringing you new patients for years, having your patients tell their friends about you is the best way to grow your referrals on Facebook. And, depending on how these new features roll out over the next month, it may soon become the only way to truly reach new patients on Facebook.
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