When it comes to social media strategy, consistency is important. Regular posting across all channels helps increase engagement with audiences, including current and potential clients, and that engagement fuels the algorithms that boost visibility. This visibility is important to ensure your practice’s social media goals are met, some of which might include:
- Being viewed as an engaged, helpful aesthetics practice
- Being viewed as a trusted expert in the field
- Sharing interesting content, which keeps your practice front of mind
While many different types of content can be created from within your practice (before/after images, short video explainers, client testimonials, etc.), one additional way to keep your social media fresh is to share content from other sources that align well with your practice’s messaging and voice.
Here are several ways to discover and share content from other sources, including articles, blog posts, images, and videos, to keep your social media presence active and engaging.
Get Alerts From Google
This free service from Google is a great tool for keeping up with interesting information being published to the web. Google will send you an email listing all of the recent posts and articles which contain any term or phrase you specify. You can set up unlimited alerts, and choose to be notified “as it happens” or in a daily digest. Setting up alerts for key industry terms can help you stay on top of news in your field, while hand-delivering fresh items to share with your various social media audiences.
BONUS TIP: Set up Google Alerts for yourself! Adding your practitioner and practice names helps ensure that you’re notified any time you are mentioned on other sites or blogs.
Aggregate Information With Tools Like Feedly or Inoreader
Screenshot via Feedly.com
Online aggregation tools can help you easily stay up-to-date with information from various sources, allowing you to quickly discover shareable stories for your social media audiences.
While Google Alerts is constantly scouring the web to deliver results from wherever they may appear, Feedly, Inoreader and other similar services display curated results from specific sources that you determine.
These sources can include industry blogs, entertainment sites, even other aesthetics practices (it’s always good to keep an eye on the competition)—or any site you choose. The ability to tag individual sources by category keeps your feeds organized and allows you to scan certain topic areas without getting overloaded. And once again, a quick couple of clicks and any item of interest can be instantly shared to your social streams.
Feedly, Inoreader and other similar services typically offer a free version that should be enough for most practitioners, while paid versions include additional features such as unlimited sources, inclusion of Google Alerts, and more.
Explore Topics Through Hashtags
When seeking new content to share, hashtags can be a valuable resource. On any of the big social networks, clicking on or searching for a hashtagged term can help you discover content and sources that might not otherwise be on your radar.
Regularly following hashtags of industry terms, or other common phrases used by interesting posts you come across on social media, can not only provide individual links, images or videos worthy of sharing, but is also a great way to discover new sources that tend to publish material your practice and your audiences might be interested in.
Be sure to make note of any hashtags you find particularly relevant when you discover them, as you’ll want to consider using them yourself for your future posts.
Organize and Curate on Twitter With Twitter Lists
Avid Twitter users can further refine their feeds through the use of Twitter Lists. This often-overlooked feature allows you to add other users to a list that you create, allowing you to view a timeline of only those users’ tweets.
Say, for example, you follow several aesthetics industry bloggers on Twitter. When looking at your overall feed, their posts will be scattered among all the tweets coming from all the users you follow. If you’ve created a list of these same bloggers, however, you can quickly switch to that timeline, and see only the tweets from the users on that particular list. You can make as many lists as you want, letting you easily curate timelines based on any topic you choose.
BONUS TIP: Lists can be public or private, so if you don’t want anyone else to see a list you’ve created, keep it private. (This is good for keeping an eye on competitors, for example.)
BONUS TIP 2: If you do find someone else with an awesome public list, you can “subscribe” to it, as if you made it yourself. You are able to follow those lists even if you don’t follow all of the members on that list.
Position Yourself as Industry Expert With A Curated E-Newsletter
This is a multi-step process, but one that can be a rewarding twist on the typical “email newsletter.”
There are plenty of email services that allow you to construct and distribute email blasts to current clients and leads, including Mailchimp and Constant Contact. (Many of these are free up to a certain amount of subscribers.)
While these services are fairly easy to set up and use, including offering pre-designed templates, practices should consider a curation email service, such as Revue. Through a browser plugin, you or any designated staff member can “collect” stories from around the web as you discover them, adding them to an online queue.
From your Revue dashboard, you are able to pull in all of those flagged links, assemble them in a cleanly formatted newsletter template, add your own text, links, images throughout, and schedule and send to your email subscribers. This is a great way to keep you and your practice in front of your email audience without coming across salesy, by providing interesting and valuable information, growing your reputation as an industry expert that can be trusted.
