The Best Facebook Ideas of 2015 for Vets

At the SPVS-VPMA Congress last week, our Susie gave a talk with Adam Tjolle from Inglis Vets in Dunfermline, Scotland. Their talk centred around the success stories from Adam’s Facebook page over 2015 and this blog post gives a few of the examples that were shown as well as the 6 rules of thumb to get the same success on your practice’s page.

1. Build a Relationship with your Community

Use your page to get your community engaged. To do this forget about promoting yourselves. Concentrate on helping your community – help to find lost pets owners, support local charities, ask your fans to share photos of their pets or where they most enjoy walking their dog and ask for opinions on relevant news stories.

If your practice or staff do something amazing, this is the place to share it! By doing so you’re becoming more than a vet practice, you’re at the heart of your community.

2. Keep it Authentic

Talk to your audience like they’re humans! Too much commercial content is off-putting, add content that you’d find interesting. An unusual case works brilliantly and you’ll also find that by building your relationship as above, your fans will start sending you great content to share too, like this:

3. Make your Audience the Stars

Working with an agency is brilliant for getting the frequency of content you need flowing. But make sure you’re posting things from inside your practice too. Patients when they come in, a new litter of puppies or an unusual breed of dog you’ve seen are occurrences that happen regularly so just remember to take a pic or video (and ask owner permission of course).

4. Inform

It often feels like Facebook fans aren’t that interested in pet health updates or educational content because they don’t engage with that sort of post. However, our survey of 300 pet owners say that health updates are actually their number 1 reason for following their vet on social media:

This kind of content is difficult to engage with which is why it might not feel like that. But persist! And make sure you include this content on your page, but make sure you’re posting content that ‘easier’ to engage with too.

5. Promote your Page

Facebook ads are highly targeted and low cost advertising. They work superbly for veterinary Facebook pages to increase your audience and to get your content seen by more people. The hard truth is that ads are the only way Facebook make money, so any business page will find it increasingly difficult to get their likes up and their content seen unless they’re using ads. 

Below is a typical result for a vet practice starting to use Facebook Ads (the ads begun mid-May). Your budget can start at just £1 per day and if you’re not sure how to advertise on Facebook, we can help you out. 

6. Have some Fun

It’s so important to remember this one. To make sure both your fans and you are enjoying your Facebook page! There is so much funny pet related content out there so it’s easy to find either elsewhere on the web or from another Facebook page and share it to your page.

You can also have lighthearted fun with patients and clients when they come in to see you. Get creative!

We’ve been working with Inglis Vets on their Facebook page for years and we’d like to say a huge thanks for being such brilliant and inventive clients and also for letting us use the examples above. 

See more from Inglis Vets on their fantastic Facebook Page.

If you’d like us to help you achieve the same, please contact us.