Your veterinary hospital’s social media might take up a lot of time. When you’re looking for a trick to speed up the process, you might consider linking your accounts. Sounds like an easy fix, right? Wrong. Linking your vet clinic’s social media accounts to all post the same thing is a huge mistake, and it can really turn off potential followers. And don’t forget – “potential followers” online are potential customers in your practice.
What do I mean by linking your accounts? Well, let’s say your veterinary hospital starts a Twitter, and it asks you if you want to link your Facebook to it. You agree, and your Twitter feed starts to look like this:
Take a look at that – their whole Twitter feed is a Facebook feed! Now – as with any examples I share – I mean NOTHING bad against this veterinary hospital. I’m sure they’re just trying to save some time.
You can link all sorts of accounts to cross post. Your Pinterest will share to Twitter, your tweets can be put on Facebook, etc, etc, etc. So why do you NOT want to do this? There are two main reasons:
1) Each social media platform has a different “culture” and purpose:
A veterinary nurse I follow on Twitter recently posted a photo, which is fairly popular around the internet – if you’re looking for social media information. This is it:
This little explanation of social media is popular because it shows how each platform has its own “language.” Every platform has a different type of mindset, and users go to them for different reasons. Respecting those nuances is a key part to social media success.
2) Linking Social Media Profiles Is Bad Customer Service
Again, linking your veterinary hospital’s social media up might sound simple. However, imagine you are a customer. You see a tweet about the basics of puppy care while scanning Twitter from your phone, so you click it. But that tweet was a Facebook post, so it launches your phone’s Facebook app. You wait, and eventually you see the post on Facebook. But then you have to click another link to get to the blog. So your phone has to launch your browser. You wait, and then you get to the blog post.
That’s a pretty extensive process to go through just to see an article on a veterinary hospital’s website, and it’s awful online customer service. If you’re trying to increase your web traffic, you want to make it as simple as possible for people to get to your site via social media. The best way to do this it to post from within the platform, not by linking all of your accounts.
Not only that, but a lot of veterinary hospitals that link their Facebook to their Twitter forget to check their Twitter for notifications, another big customer service no-no. (Read about that here.) All in all, your veterinary clients just aren’t getting a good experience with you when your accounts are all mashed up.
Are there exceptions to this rule?
While I never recommend linking accounts, you can occasionally share the same content on different platforms. For example, if you have a great graphic, it might be appreciated on both Facebook and Pinterest. Just spread the posts apart, and make sure they suit the platforms you’re putting them on!
If you have any more questions, please feel free to contact me.