How to Gather Feedback on Social Media

08/21/19 | by Terrnekia Collier | Social Media

If you’re interested in collecting feedback from your patients or clients, social media is an excellent way to help you gather that information.

Although leaving online reviews about businesses on sites like Yelp and Google are extremely popular with customers, social media feedback gives your practice another channel to utilize in order to find out what your clients think about your business.

Users go online constantly to share their thoughts and opinions about encounters that they had involving businesses. When you’re present on social media, you can address your audience directly and provide ongoing support outside of the office.

Using different social platforms is also one of the fastest methods of communication. People may take days to respond to emails or miss your phone call. However, they can quickly and easily respond to a tweet or a message on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and go about their day.
Billions of people around the world are tapped into social media and you can use this opportunity to build patient loyalty and book more appointments at your practice.

As a small business owner, you should want to know what people are saying about you on social media because it can either help or hurt your brand reputation.

Now, it’s time to get active and communicate with your patients and clients online. Below, we’ve curated the best ways for you to use social media to gather feedback and improve your web presence.

Create a social media marketing strategy.

Before we get started on tips for collecting feedback, you will first need to create an overall social media strategy. This strategy will save you time because you’ll know what content is being posted and when, how to effectively target your audience, as well as enable you to share objectives with your staff.

You should also include guidelines in your strategy for how to handle any and all responses you get from current and potential clients online. There should be rules in place for what you can and cannot say because, remember, the internet is forever. You don’t want to have a stain on your reputation for disregarding a patient or being unprofessional.

If you have a social media strategy available, you can take appropriate action to respond to people and collect their feedback.
Now that we’ve got you thinking about your strategy, let’s hop into how to gather social media feedback.

1. Monitor your comments and mentions.

When you post content on your pages, what type of responses do you receive? Is it positive, negative, or constructive? It’s necessary to not only make conversation with your following on social media but to actively listen to the discussions regarding your brand, the content you post, and the industry you’re in.

This is called social listening. In order to get a good grasp on what your clients and patients expect from you on your social channels, simply listen to what they are saying. You don’t have to guess what they want from you, you’ll know.

People are very vocal about their opinions on social media, so it should not be difficult to assess what they think and feel about your products, services, content, or business. Respond to these comments and do so in a timely manner.

According to HubSpot, these are the average response times customers expect from companies on social media:

Facebook – 85% of customers on Facebook expect a response within 6 hours.
Twitter – 64% of customers on Twitter expect a response within an hour.
Try to reach out to clients and patients as soon as possible so they know you care about their issue and would like to resolve it quickly.

* Bonus tip: Even if you’re not directly mentioned or your followers don’t respond to your actual post, you can still see what clients are saying about you by searching the name of your business.

2. Conduct polls and surveys.

Each and every one of your clients may not be open to publicly leaving detailed feedback, so conducting polls and customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to give those people an opportunity to anonymously tell you what they think.

You can post a status with a link to the survey or poll, email it, put it in your profile information on your social accounts, or send it directly to patients and clients through messaging.

For example, if you own a local veterinary practice and you’ve started selling your own brand of dog food to clients, you can survey those clients to ask how much their dogs enjoy the food and if they’ve seen a difference in their dog’s coat, energy, or behavior since switching.

Customer satisfaction surveys will give your followers a chance to tell you what they feel about your new product and what they think you can change or improve upon.

You can use additional survey tools if you wish. But, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn now all offer the option to post a poll for your followers to vote in. It’s a great way to encourage engagement with your audience while collecting useful social media feedback.

3. Use social media analytics.

If you’re a business using social media, you should be analyzing the metrics collected on these platforms. How well are your pages doing and how often are people engaging with your content? The social analytics feature that is built into most social platforms gives you insight into your performance and what content is doing best among your clients or patients.

Here are a few basic analytics features you should be familiar with:
Impressions – The number of times your content was displayed on someone’s timeline and whether or not they clicked on it.
Engagement Rate – A metric that shows how many people interacted with a certain piece of content you posted.
Page Visits – The number of times users viewed your profile.
Post Reach – The number of people who had your post on their screen (this includes paid promotions and organic).

You should check your social analytics every day or once a week to stay up-to-date on whatever content is performing the best among your targeted audience.

4. Communicate with clients one-on-one.

Responding to your followers publicly is great, but directly messaging them can also be useful. When there are no onlookers, many people are more willing to tell you what they really think and feel. Directly messaging them on social media gives you two the privacy needed for your clients and patients to be completely honest about what they expect from you.

As your business responds to more and more people directly, this also improves your web presence and your relationship with them.

Social Media Feedback for Your Practice

Now that you know of our top ways to gather social media feedback, you can integrate these ideas into your marketing strategy and increase engagement with your content on all your social channels. Customer satisfaction is an integral part of running a successful practice, so use the valuable information you collect to your advantage.