Social Media Reality Check for Practitioners
Track where your bookings really come from before spending another evening on Instagram, and see whether the numbers agree with you.
Track where your bookings really come from before spending another evening on Instagram, and see whether the numbers agree with you.
Posting steadily, booking rarely You've been putting up carousels since Tuesday and the diary looks the same as it did in April. We think it's worth working out what the posting is really for, before you do another hour of it.
You've posted Monday, Wednesday, Friday, always on schedule, like a bin collection.
The likes come in. The diary stays exactly as it was, with the same three regulars and the empty Thursday afternoon nobody's filled since March.
People call this an engagement problem. It's a booking problem wearing an engagement costume, and you've been feeding it selfies.
Nobody's diary ever filled up because a post did well.
Wellness marketing challenges: challenges nearby to this:
Find yourself: some of the fields we serve:
You made a carousel about hydration. Nine slides, a font you agonised over, one typo you noticed at 11pm and decided to leave.
It reached four hundred people. Three of them already had an appointment booked for March.
That's something, but small. The people who most need to find you haven't met you yet. They were never going to see a post at all.
The app gives you a little graph, going up, which feels like praise.
What it gives you is a mood. The one number you want - did the phone ring because of it - never shows up on the graph.
You can have four hundred likes and a silent phone at the same time. You can also have a full washing line and rain forecast for six.
Most small UK practices spend under £250 a month on marketing, and run the whole thing themselves, with no written plan at all.
That's a tidy statistic for what is, in practice, you at the kitchen table on a Tuesday, trying to write a caption for a photo of a spine, while something's defrosting.
You're not behind. You're describing a Tuesday most practices are also having, separately, in their own kitchens, each one thinking it's the only kitchen doing this.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
You post the testimonial. You post the before-and-after. You post the little clip of you laughing with a patient, which took four takes because the first three you looked like you were being arrested.
All of it is true, and warm, and entirely reasonable content.
None of it answers the one question a patient in pain this week is asking, which is why you, specifically, and how soon.
Some practices get a slow, reliable trickle of new clients from a Facebook group they haven't opened since Easter.
Others post every single day and hear back only their own voice, arriving late, like an echo in an empty hallway.
Effort is clearly present in both cases. The two groups are just standing in different places when the patient starts looking.
Buying an advertising slot before agreeing what you're really saying is like buying a van before deciding what you deliver.
You'll have a lovely van. Sat on the drive. Doing nothing useful, because nobody's worked out what goes in the back of it.
Decide the message before you decide the platform. It sounds obvious written down, and almost nobody does it in that order.
A platform is a delivery method. It isn't a plan.
It tends to arrive after a slow Thursday, in the car park, engine off, you still sitting there for a minute.
You were right that people need to find you. A Reels video was never going to be the thing that did it.
Call it a correction, arriving a bit late, the way most useful ones do.
A referral from a GP or a physio down the road is worth ten polished posts, easily.
Nobody screenshots it. There's no little heart icon for it. It gets no credit and no attention, while the Reels video gets both.
You end up managing for the visible thing, because it's visible. The invisible thing was doing the actual work.
Social media is very good at rewarding the look of being busy. The stories, the behind-the-scenes, the shot of your diary looking full.
It does nothing for the plain mechanics of a patient typing "physio near me" at eleven at night, in pain, on their phone, in bed.
That patient isn't scrolling your Stories. They're Googling, half asleep, hoping something local comes up before they give in and take a paracetamol.
Stop posting for four weeks and watch what changes. Most people are too frightened to try this.
The answer tends to be uncomfortable and useful in equal measure, like finding out what the house sounds like with the radio off.
Some clinics discover a decent Google Business listing does more in a year than Stories managed in twelve months of daily uploads.
Not a glamorous sentence. Still a true one, worth more than another carousel.
Work out what your marketing is really for, and find the shorter route to the same result. Resolve your challenges
A 25-minute conversation reveals whether stepping back from social media serves your practice or hinders it. We’ll examine current activity against booking sources, identify alternatives worth developing, and determine honestly whether this direction fits your situation.
If this goes nowhere useful, you’ve still got your afternoon. Which is fine.
The discovery call maps what alternatives might look like for your practice. If reducing social media time makes sense, we’ll discuss how to redirect those hours toward activities that more directly serve your work. If maintaining a bounded online presence fits better, we’ll identify parameters that serve without depleting.
Either way, you’ll have clarity about what builds the practice you want. Wednesday afternoons back. That’s the real metric.
The best practitioners always find their way here. We have a story garden, a listening wind and a visual river waiting to make sense of themselves - they do, beautifully, in a twenty-five-minute conversation over a good coffee. How do you take it?
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