Hot new social photo sharing website Pinterest is a great opportunity for physicians to promote their brand, practice, staff, treatments, and beyond …

Filed Under Internet and Healthcare, Medical Headlines

Pinterest is a photo sharing and photo tagging (pinning) website that allows individuals and businesses to collect and organize photos and comments into ‘boards’ for the world to see. Lots of people use Pinterest to get inspiration for the most important projects in their life. People use Pinterest to plan their vacations, redecorate their homes, and create menus for holiday dinners to name a few.

What does Pinterest mean for doctors?

Pinterest is a opportunity to drive traffic to your medical practice website. There are cases where the traffic is better than Facebook. This is a great opportunity to give visitors a visual experience of your practice, staff, and offerings. This can translate into more referrals.

To give you an idea of the number and why there is so much seo interest, “in the past six months, visits to Pinterest grew by 4000%, receiving an amazing 11 million hits in just one week.” [source TheNextWeb article]. At least for now, this hot new social photo sharing site is sending seo link juice back to your website. This will help with the inbound links and your website’s rank.

So what are some specific uses of Pinterest for doctors and physician offices?

Promote your medical brand, practice, and ’sell’ your practice visually
Make your medical brand and practice personal
Familiarize new patients with the faces of physicians and staff
Engage current patients with the office and staff visually
Market and sell products – post photos of products
Inspire your patients
Offer an exclusive discounts or specials (may be good for products or aesthetic treatments like Botox)
Keep patients coming back to your boards by posting special offers regularly
Have your pins auto-post to your Facebook Page for greater reach
Non-profits can leverage Pinterest’s traffic to raise awareness for a cause
Post treatment process, equipment, and office experience photos to help make patients be comfortable and educated prior to their visit
Invite patients to events or education/lectures
Post photos from previous events to help promote future ones

What do you do next?

Step 1: Set up an account at pinterest.com.
Step 2: Optimize your photos of your practice, screenshots, and other photos of interest; before and afters, office, staff, etc.
Step 3: Create a ‘board’ on Pinterest. Choose some categories like our office, our staff, products, etc.
Step 4: Upload or pin the photos directly off your site’s hosting account.
Step 5: Optimize the text and be sure to configure the link of each image to go back to a specific page on your website.
Step 6: Send the Pinterest links out in your networks so web crawlers can gobble up the links and add to the page rank of your website.

One of the clear advantages of using social media as part of your medical practice marketing strategy is that it makes it fun and easy to make your medical brand and medical practice personal. Pinterest is the next hot thing, so get on board early to grow your community and take advantage of the link juice/traffic to your medical practice website. In the end, you want to inspire new patients to choose you as their provider.

About us

Vital Element, Inc. provides comprehensive medical web site design, web-based medical marketing, and web-based medical efficiency solutions. Our services range from pure medical web marketing to web based communications, medical IT resource development and healthcare cost containment application development. We surround our services with ongoing management and support.

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