Or follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn and stay in touch.
Anne-Marie van Geloven
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In 2012 I've launched an innovative medical grade eye lift strip called . It's the first and only product developed for Lily Leading Instant Eye Lift, botulinum toxin related ptosis (droopy eyelid) which became increasingly popular to use for create a temporary eye lift by makeup artists and customers with aging or hanging upper eyelids. Lily Leading Instant Eye Lift is sold in my online shop. Ever since, I started blogging more often about cosmetic related topics and of course injectables like botulinum toxin and dermal fillers. Here is the link to my new blog. I hope you'll visit me there to read my latest online articles.
Or follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn and stay in touch. Anne-Marie van Geloven
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The use of social media offers many opportunities, but the boundaries between professional and personal communications could fade. The digital main pitfalls and opportunities for doctors / medical professionals are put together in the Guides for Physicians and Social Media.
UK: Social Media Guide for Doctors and Medical Students - UK Australia & New Zealand: Social Media Guide for Medical Students and Practitioners US: AMA Social Media Guide - USA Nederland: Handreiking Artsen en Social Media. Social media is often uncharted territory for doctors, while more millions of people use it. This penetrates slowly but surely also in health care. More and more online social networking platforms with which physicians and with patients enter in interactive dialogues and knowledge and share experiences. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly popular. It is important that physicians are aware of possible pitfalls. Social Media Toolkit How create a social media strategy and how to maintain it? The Social Media Toolkit of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may answer these questions. Anyone who has lost his way in the world of twitter, micro blogs, widgets, and virtual world can catch up here: Social Media Toolkit - Free Download Practice’s marketing and business plan should include strategies on how to drive more traffic to the practice’s web site. The benefits of doing so are numerous, and can have a significant bottom line impact on your practice. Not only is your site available 24/7, it has no incremental costs in servicing additional visitors. You can drive as many visitors as you want to your site, the costs will not increase and you will likely profit from your efforts as you gain new patients from that traffic.
How many visitors should you get on your web site? What kind of traffic is reasonable to expect? Research shows of over 100 active (50+ visitors per month) sites indicates that you can expect to receive an average of 172 web site visitors per month for every full time physician in your practice. That's 172 information displays handled by the web site instead of a staff member, representing significant cost savings to your practice. Factor in the new patients you might receive from those visitors, and the increased patient satisfaction in being able to immediately have key questions answered 24/7, and you have a compelling argument to make your web site strategy a priority. If you’re in the process of creating a web site traffic strategy, or you find that your web site traffic is below average, here are 12 tips that can help you to increase your web site traffic: 1. Give Patients a Reason to Visit - Create and promote a reason for patients to visit your site. The most useful reason is for patients to fill in a patient history form online before every exam, or to book or confirm their appointments online, or to purchase your products online. A useful reason will almost guarantee a patient visit to your site and start educating the patient to think ‘web site first’ when looking for information about the practice. 2. Educate Your Patients - Try to educate patients to visit your web site for all their basic information needs. This education might come in the form of a printed handout when they visit the office or by having your staff talk to each patient. 3. Web Site Address Everywhere - Put your web site address on all your print materials (business cards, letterhead, invoices, forms, advertisements, etc.). 4. Let the Phone Help You – If you have an automated phone system, be sure the recording lets patients know that they can find answers to their questions on your web site. Make sure that patients learn about your web site while they are on hold, and also modify your voicemail to include your web site address. 5. Google AdWords or Other Online Advertising - Start a Google AdWords campaign or any other form of online advertising to allow new visitors to find your site more easily. 6. Get More Links from Branch related sites - List your site in all the related directories and online doctor finders to increase the number of places from which new patients can find you. 7. Search Engine Optimization - Optimize your site for the search engines so that your site will rank at the top of Google for searches that are relevant to your practice. This will allow potential patients as well as existing patients to find you with a Google search. 8. Talk To Your Patients - Talk your patients about your site. Ask them if they've visited it, get some feedback, and help educate them on the uses of your web site. 9. Follow-up - After an in-office consultation with a patient, make sure you follow-up by mail or email. Direct them to your web site where they might get more information about the results of their visit and make a purchase from your site. 10. Make Your Site Attractive and Up-To-Date – A number of the visitors to your web site are repeat visitors, and if your site isn’t attractive, or up-to-date with the latest information about the practice, you’re likely to lose these repeat visitors. 11. Add a blog to your website - When you add a blog to your website, you make your website more attractive and dynamic. It provides a reason to visit and could add value to your patients when blogging educational and/or answering their questions. 12. Engage via Social media – Social Media is a great tool to share “advertise” your website. Post an update with a link to your website to share (new) information like: your (educational) blog posts, discounts or seasonal activities, (new) therapies, services, staff members, etcetera. When done well (depending on your execution and value you bring to your followers) will definitely increase the number of visitors to your website. Note: It is called social media, you will have to give value (information sharing), before you get (followers and potential new customers). Traffic does not build itself. You need to make active efforts to drive visitors to your web site or they won't visit. Brandconnexion: Your Business - Our Concern If you are surpassed the limits of the amount of information you can consume and qualify as an information junkie….here are 5 things you can do about it..... 1 Pare down. You do not need to join more than a few social networks to do most of what you need to do in your work. What are the core networks you use on a daily basis? Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube…? The rest you can ignore and not feel your work — or life — will suffer. 2 Turn off. How many pings do you get a day? Turn off the ones you don’t care about. Now turn off the ones that are just “good to know,” because I’m sure you cannot point to one that has totally changed your business or your life. 3 Designate time. If you are checking your emails, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of your networks more than several times daily, you are being controlled by your impulses to check, check, check to make sure you haven’t missed anything. If it isn’t your job to monitor the social mediasphere for a client, you’re falling into the trap of “always more and never enough.” Be discriminating and methodical. 4 Filter Better. Narrow your searches terms to a few mission critical terms, and be more specific to cut through the clutter. 5 Go cold turkey. If you’re really struggling with managing your information intakes, just stop. Go a few days completely disconnected. None of us will die without social media. But life could pass us by if we let it take over our lives. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. Follow the model of a typical marketing plan: 1. Identify Target and Objectives 2. Conduct Market Analysis (target group, trends, needs, competition, best practices, etc) 3. Plan your Social Media Program Components/Timeframe of Execution (including integration with traditional campaign) 4. Assessment and Allocation of Resources 5. Monitor, Measure and Adjust-Improve More specific steps you should take when creating a social media marketing plan: 1. Participate and Learn: If you’re not involved in social media, get involved. Consider this as a learning - training period! At a minimum, join Facebook, LinkedIn, and start following some industry blogs. You will find it very difficult to sell or even construct a social media marketing plan if you aren’t familiar with the functionality, strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms. 2. Target Audience: Define your targeting audience(s) and key stakeholders 3. Market Research: Take each group (grateful patients, referring physicians, employees, reporters, influencers in the community) and outline your marketing objectives related to that group (keep it short and simple - KISS). Examine how each group currently uses social media. Look at industry best practices and review the activities of your top competitors. 4. Targets and Objectives: Define your goals: brand awareness/stature, enhanced search rankings and web traffic, increased preference, and improved patient volumes. And be as specific as possible. The outcomes you desire should impact the ways in which you measure results. Put it in a time schedule: what do you want to achieve, by when? 5. Toolbox: Identify social media vehicles that help you accomplish your marketing objectives, by audience. This will become your toolbox. The vehicles you select need to take into account a number of factors including: resources available, desired outcomes, and ability to deliver your message/content. This assumes that you know the strengths of various social media platforms. (Hopefully you’ve done the earlier analysis of each group’s use of social media). This is the step that may require the most research. For example, you may not know what LinkedIn groups reach a specific target audience, so you’ll need to get online and start digging around. Join those groups and start following the conversation. Find out what these people care about and talk about. Another example, you’ll need to identify the top bloggers/thought leaders that you will want to influence? 6. Integration: Define the process you will use to make sure the program is integrated with traditional marketing and branding efforts of your organization. And don’t forget about PR and media relations. There are lots of great social media tools that can make your PR program more effective. Be sure to integrate that into the plan as well. Internal communications should also be integrated into the plan. 7. Plan Resources: Make your program sustainable and avoid social media fatigue! You’ll need to get tactical by identifying how you’ll use the platform given the resources you have available (internal or external). A great deal of information can be re-purposed and shared within various social media platforms. So think this through carefully. You also need to define workflow – and who will do the work. And who will develop content for these various outreach mechanisms? How will information flow within your organization to the content generators? Stay focused. Less is more. Better to do few things great than lots of things poorly. You can expand in time. 8. Measure and Monitor: Determine how you will measure results. You will want to build in measurement tools, in line with your set targets and objectives. Actively monitor social media. This should be part of your strategy. There are several measurement and monitoring tools available. 10. Policy: Develop an ‘employee social media policy'. With an increase in social media engagement by your organization, having an employee social media policy becomes more important. You would also need a response plan - how to deal with unsatisfied customers and who is doing it. 11. Respond: Make sure everybody knows your crisis response plan. Let a press release or official statement guide your response. Link the official statement to Facebook, twitter, blog, etcetera. Monitor mentions of the incident. Be prepared to answer questions. Do not argue with detractors, stay calm in your response - stick to the facts. Be honest and transparent. A swift, kind and honest discussion on twitter can turn into a disaster. Don't take it personal. An unhappy customer can have a big voice. 12. Adjust and Improve Brandconnexion: Your Business - Our Concern
1. Join or Participate in Groups and Start and manage a group or fan page for your product, brand or business.
Join a group, connect with peers and share links to your own blog or site. Find out the latest industry news. 2. Answer and Ask Questions The “Answers” section of LinkedIn, where people go to ask their business-related questions and where business takes place. Avoiding answering questions is a missed opportunity to establish your self as an expert or find potential new customers. By asking questions you learn (for example about your customers needs). Set up to receive LinkedIn messages in your inbox so you can respond right away. 3. Don’t Overly Self-Promote when Answering Questions Give honest and valuable guidance, don’t sell. Building a relationship takes time and trust. Let them contact you directly if they have more questions. 4. Complete Your Profile Make sure your profile is complete, so people can learn all about you and gain trust and establish authority. Describe your role at your current and previous companies, and provide links to your website and any relevant profiles (i.e. Twitter). 5. Complete Company Page Your company page has the potential to gain LinkedIn followers who will see your blog posts, company profile updates, and job openings in their LinkedIn newsfeed. If your company description isn’t filled in, it might prevent people from following you, or finding you. Optimize your company page by including relevant keywords and links to your website. 6. Optimize Your Profile for SEO Optimizing your LinkedIn profile for SEO will only a few minutes. By adding custom anchor text to the website links on your profile, the links will pass higher-quality SEO authority. To optimize these links: ▪ Click “edit” next to the website link ▪ In the Choose dropdown, click “Other” ▪ Enter the name of your website ▪ Enter the URL 7. Promote Your LinkedIn Page on Your Website Use widgets and add a LinkedIn icon to your website to increase awareness of your presence on LinkedIn. Make it easy for your visitors to find out how to connect with you in social media. 8. Do Market research Gain knowledge with polls, share survey and poll results with your contacts. Research your prospects before meeting them. 9. Don’t Ignore Connection Invitations Once you provide value in Answers and Groups, people will start inviting you to connect with them on LinkedIn. Don’t just ignore these invitations and feel the need to personally know everyone that you connect with. LinkedIn automatically sorts your connections based on how you know them; whether through a current or previous job, or through a group. 10. Keep your profile current 11. Share useful Information Useful articles and resources that will be of interest to customers and prospects. Post your presentations on your profile using a presentation application. Link to articles and content posted elsewhere, with a summary of why it’s valuable to add to your credibility. 12. Share your updates (also on other social media accounts) LinkedIn is a more professional social networking site than Facebook and twitter, so it’s likely that you’ll have different followers here who will benefit from seeing your updates. Re-purpose content across all of the social channels, but don’t not duplicating the content. 13. Recommend Write honest and valuable recommendations for your contacts. Request LinkedIn recommendations from happy costumers willing to provide testimonials. 14. Connect Ask your first-level contacts for introductions to their first-level contacts. Import cards and contacts from other applications to find more connections. Export your contacts into other applications. 15. Find Prospects, potential business partners or services you can use. Post job listings to find qualified talent. Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event. Digital footprint is a collection of information, traces, trail or “footprint” you leave behind during your activities in a digital environment.
Other words used for digital footprint are: data exhaust, clickstream exhaust or slug trail. This information is transmitted by mobile phone, TV, world wide web, mobile web and other devices and sensors through emails, attachments, forum registration, uploading video’s, etcetera, all leaving traces of information about you available to others on the internet. In social media a digital footprint is the size of your online presence and the number of individuals you interact with. Inputs to digital footprint include location, time and day, attention, login - log out, search results and key words, content created and consumed, digital activity, data from sensors and from your social crowd. There are two types of collected data: Passive: data collected about an action without any client activation e.g. IP information collected by a web server. Active: created when the personal data is released deliberately by the user for the purpose of sharing information about oneself. Your digital footprint can provide valuable data for targeted marketing or building a digital reputation / personal branding. Be careful and aware, because your digital footprint will be around for a long time and google (for example) doesn't forget or forgive. Brandconnexion: Your Business - Our Concern
Brandconnexion: Your Business - Our Concern
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