Stop Flooding Your Facebook Timeline With Reviews

As patients and consumers, we have a multitude of options when it comes to where we can leave our positive or negative feedback regarding our experience or purchase. Among these options, the most popular sites for patient feedback tend to be Facebook, Google, Yelp, Healthgrades and ZocDoc. We know reviews are important to local SEO, Google has expressed their role in local rankings, and they can play a major role in new patient acquisition online. In fact, 84% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. This blog is not about receiving or obtaining reviews (if needing help acquiring positive patient feedback – check out the Elevate DDS reputation management platform here), it’s about not sending every review you do receive to your Facebook Timeline.

To be clear, we are talking about pushing reviews directly to your timeline and not the review widget embedded from your patient communication software on the left sidebar of your Facebook page. The widget can stay and should automatically update with the most recent reviews.

Let’s start from the beginning. You have set up your patient communication software (Lighthouse 360, RevenueWell, etc) or a reputation management software to solicit online patient reviews for your practice. Excellent! You have also decided to have your software of choice share/push your positive reviews onto your Facebook Timeline. This functionality within these platforms is often called “auto-share”. Auto-share allows the positive reviews you receive through your software to automatically post onto your timeline as you receive them. While showcasing positive reviews from multiple websites to your Facebook followers sounds ideal… let’s see it in action.

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Put Yourself In Your Followers Shoes

Imagine you’re scrolling your Facebook news feed and see a chiropractor you follow has shared a 5-star review they received from Google. You skim the review, it leaves a positive impression on you and you keep scrolling. Maybe you book a massage that afternoon. Well done on the chiropractor’s part, mission accomplished for the best case scenario.

Now let’s say you are scrolling your news feed and your dentist shares their 5-star review. A little bit further down your feed, you see another positive review posted from your dentist. Great, happy others feel the same way you do about your doctor! At lunch time, you jump on your Facebook and once again you see another review your dentist has shared. You probably don’t read this one as it’s the third post you’ve seen from them in one day. This continues for days, weeks, etc. Your news feed is continuously flooded with their reviews and it’s either annoying or you look past anything they post now. Even though the content of the review is different each time, it looks like the same post over and over to followers. See example below:

You feel bad unfollowing your dentist’s Facebook page (although many people won’t feel bad unfollowing a business) so you “hide them from your news feed”. You never have to see a single post from them again. You may even think “if I want to see anything from them I’ll just go to their page”. Most likely, you will never interact with their page again.

What’s the Big Deal?

Now flip this to your practice. The more people that hide your posts from their news feed the less reach you have. So that stellar post you had made showcasing your porcelain veneers special, fewer people will see this and possibly fewer patients take advantage of your special. This means less engagement with your posts, fewer interactions as a whole, and less discreet reminders to whiten their teeth and schedule cleanings. One of the beauties of social media is being able to stay top of mind, without being bothersome. You lose this with over posting and risk your page being “unliked” or hidden from patient news feeds.

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How Do I Share Some Reviews But Not All?

If you are pushing reviews via a patient communication software or a reputation management tool, reach out to the company providing the service. Most have the ability to limit the number of reviews pushed to your social network sites. “But what if it doesn’t share a phenomenal review that I want to showcase?” Shouldn’t be an issue. Most platforms allow you to go in at any time and manually share any review you’d like to your different social media channels. If you’re in the market for a reputation management tool, ask your dental marketing company if they have the capability to customize this.

Striking a Balance

We’ve covered Facebook here but the same goes for Twitter and Google +. Either turn your auto-share settings off or set your software to share minimal reviews a day if you really like this feature. In many cases, dentists choose to turn this functionality off. They receive enough reviews on Facebook itself, that they don’t feel the need to push other reviews to their timeline. While it may not be apples to apples, you know “Aunt Margret” who shares 10 cat photos a day? Yes, don’t be like “Aunt Margret.”

From local businesses we typically like to see informative, funny if applicable, community-based and business specific posts. This variety keeps us engaged. Show us your remodeled office, talk to us about the importance of flossing, showcase a special, share your latest blog post and let us see your dental hygienist’s office birthday party. We want to see your new office, we expect to see dental health information and we probably want to wish our hygienist a happy birthday too. But the only time we want to read 10 patient reviews on your office in one day is when we are seeking you out. Meaning we are going to your Google, Facebook, and Yelp pages looking for this information. Not thrown at us and taking up real estate on our news feed.

Recap

Obtaining positive patient reviews on as many platforms as you can is great for local SEO and your practice. What’s not great is bombarding your followers news feeds with every positive review you receive. This risks less engaged followers, patients unliking your page and ultimately can result in lost business. Reach out to your dental marketing company to adjust your review platform’s auto-share settings so you can strike the appropriate balance of reviews, photos and personalized posts for your practice’s social media pages. This balance keeps your practice top of mind and followers engaged.

The Best Solution for Reviews

If you want to generate reviews like a pro, check out our review generation platform here and give us a call. We guarantee you will like the results.