Social network ’share’ buttons have increased the number of ways that individuals can share information online. Now, Google has decided to implement a feature that offers the same convenience. In late March, Google unveiled their plans for the +1 button. This would allow individuals to share organic search engine results as well as web pages with friends.

Details and Features of Google’s +1 Button

• The +1 button will appear next to each website in Google’s search results
• Later, webmasters will also have the option to add the +1 button to their websites along with their other social media buttons
• The goal of this button is not to broadcast information for all the world to see, instead, friends that login to their Google accounts will be able to see which search results or websites you have marked as worth reading
• +1 buttons will also be added to Google ads
• Google will likely use these +1 votes as a factor in search engine rankings

This change will provide a new way for you to share information with your patients using the +1 button to mark search results. It will also provide greater convenience to patients that would like to share your services with others (when the button is on your site).

Take Advantage of Google’s & Other SEO Strategies

MedNet pays close attention to the frequent changes at Google and we adjust our SEO strategies accordingly. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your practice become more visible in search results.

As a member of the medical community looking to establish an SEO presence, it is possible to make mistakes. The American Medical Association (AMA) has even enacted a policy that provides medical professionals with some guidelines on appropriate social media behavior. Below you can review some of the specific standards. These deliver the underlying message that it’s unethical to do anything online - with regards to your patients - that you wouldn’t do in an offline environment.

AMA Guidelines for Social Media Use by the Medical Profession

The AMA has proposed the following guidelines with their policy. We have also outlined what it dictate with regards to appropriate online behavior. These guidelines apply to how you engage with others on Facebook, Twitter, or your blog.

1. Remember patients’ privacy when engaging with people online - social media allows you to interact with your patients in new ways. You are provided with the opportunity to field their questions, provide information about procedures, and share successful results with the world. Make sure that this is accomplished in a way that puts patient privacy first. Never divulge names or display photos of your patients’ faces. Also be careful in your interactions - even if a patient provides some personal information while posing a question, you cannot respond with anything that compromises their privacy regardless of what they have divulged already. Continue your discussion in a private setting if this is a risk - use a private messaging function or setup a consultation in your office.

2. Remember that anything you put online does not go away - even if you think you are posting something that’s protected by privacy settings, there’s the potential for it to be viewed by a greater audience. A good rule of thumb when you’re using social networks as a medical practice is to avoid posting anything you wouldn’t want the whole world to see, regardless of your privacy settings.

3. Remain professional when using social networks for your practice - it is a rule that you likely keep offline; that you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure, and it applies online too. If you have a Twitter account for your practice, use that to engage with patients and discuss industry-relevant topics. Keep a separate account for social interactions so you can discuss topics that have no relationship to your brand image as a medical professional.

Learn More About Effective Use of Social Media in Medicine

Please contact us today if you’d like to discuss an online visibility strategy to get your practice integrated in social media in a manner that will benefit your patients and your online presence.

Social media and blogs open up the opportunity for a very different type of marketing that can help give your practice more exposure. Instead of simply relying upon direct marketing and promotions to draw in new clients, you can connect with them on a more personal level by providing them with helpful information. You don’t need to dispense medical advice through social media or on your blog, but you can provide some education - something patients truly appreciate when it comes to their health. This will help you to develop a rapport with clients, and possibly generate a greater number of referrals.

How To Share Information On Your Blog or Social Media Account

The types of information you can share with your patients include the following:

1. General medical information - you can provide tips on how to find a great doctor or specialist, how to determine which services are covered by insurance, and what information patients should share with a medical professional on their first visit to a practice, for example.
2. Basic questions and answers about procedures - patients like to be armed with knowledge before they step into your office to discuss a procedure. If you have not provided this background, they will find it elsewhere, so it is worth sharing on your blog or via social media. Simply outlining the basics of the procedure, the recovery (if any), the benefits and the potential side effects can all go a long way.
3. Relevant medical news - if there is anything exciting happening in the industry that has relevance to patients, or you have specific news relating to your practice, patients would appreciate hearing about it!

When you present the above information, it can be unique to your practice or you can provide a link to another reputable source. With either approach, you are acting as a source of information and this has its benefits to your online reputation!

Helping You Market Your Practice Online

We can help you start forming this kind of connection with existing and prospective patients with our web visibility and blog article writing services.

With the rise of social media for brand awareness, online marketing now requires a carefully balanced strategy. High page rankings, quantity of quality backlinks and more used to be a few of the major players in making a website successful from an online marketing standpoint. They still do have a major impact, but now, to have your website rise up those ranks, a greater level of interaction with the general public is required.

Your involvement with social media can actually impact just how much visibility your medical website receives. Using Facebook or Twitter alone can improve your online presence and help you reach your target audience, but more than that, it can also help improve your website ranking. In the past, it’s been debated whether or not social media plays a role with the strength and authority of a website, but recently it’s been confirmed that in fact, search engines like Google and Bing do rely somewhat upon social media reputation as well.

How Social Media Effects Search Engine Rankings

Your social media activities have an influence upon more than just the social media search tools that the major search engines offer. The more active you are online and the better associated you are with other reputable social media accounts, the more authority you will gain. This means that when you mention another website on social media, you’ll play a greater role in setting their website rankings because of your own reputation.

Essentially, when a site is mentioned on social media, the same ranking consideration takes place when a ‘person’ does it as when another website does (with backlinks, for example), just to a lesser degree. The more frequently a website is mentioned by reputable, highly-ranked social media accounts or websites, the higher its own rankings will become. Social media accounts just happen to have less influence because of some specific limitations that have been placed upon them, but their role is still important, especially when your activities on Twitter or Facebook can do even more for your practice that have benefits beyond your website rankings.

How Your Social Media Activities Can Help Your Site’s Rankings

With an understanding that social media activities do play a role in your website rankings, there are a number of things that you can do to ensure that your practice’s website is benefiting from this knowledge:

1. Get active on social media - start interacting with the people that follow you on a regular basis to increase the reputation of your social media account in the eyes of the search engine.
2. Promote your website content - posting your own website content, especially as your social media account is in good standing, can have benefits to your website rankings. But it also encourages other people to share the content that you’ve posted, and each and every time they do, that moves your website up the ranks.
3. Engage with people of influence - if you start engaging with people influential on social media with plenty of followers who share great-quality links and content, you’ll have some strong accounts pulling for the success of your website in time as this may compel them to retweet something you’ve posted on Twitter, for example.
4. Post information that’s newsworthy - Google has mentioned that the more an article is shared on Facebook or Twitter, the better an opportunity it has to appear on their News page and rank high. Adding new, exciting content to your practice’s blog or website that you know is current and relevant to what’s happening in the world will catch the attention of social media users.

MedNet Can Help Your Practice Get Social!

For more information on how social media influences search engine rankings, watch this video and be sure to contact us so we can help you with your online marketing strategy.

Social networks have begun to play a much more important role in the world of online marketing and SEO, and they’re finding their way into the mainstream components of social network features. Since the Bing and Yahoo! merger, Bing has become a trendsetter in establishing a variety of cutting-edge features. The additions it has made related to Facebook as outlined below are just a few of the things that they’ve rolled out to continue their growth in the new year.

Facebook Like Annotations on Bing

Over the past year, Facebook has really pushed its ‘Like’ feature to new levels, allowing it to be integrated directly onto a business’ website. Following its increased use, Bing decided to include social annotations which means liked pages can have an impact upon the Bing rankings of an individual. Social media does influence search engine rankings minimally, but with this addition, Facebook activity can have a great effect, especially since ‘liked’ pages are public in most circumstances while a lot of other Facebook features that they could use for ranking reputation are kept private (like a user’s Wall, for example).

The incorporation of ‘Like’ data by Bing will also serve another purpose beyond rankings. It creates greater networking opportunities by showing the websites that friends have liked each time an individual logs into Bing and a query is made. The idea of customized search results using friend Facebook data is an interesting one and it can definitely allow medical practices to get greater exposure amongst their target audiences. As friends start liking the websites, their friends will have greater exposure to them in their search results and that can encourage them to like the page. In a way, it’s a modern referral process that the medical community already relies upon greatly!

We can help you work with Bing’s new functions and develop a social media strategy that will allow you to benefit from these recent changes and evolve your strategy with others in the future.

Twitter is an excellent tool for branding yourself. Although it may seem very basic at first, it has many features that can be utilized to rapidly spread awareness about the services you offer.

The Language of Twitter

You are going to notice that Twitter seems to have its own language. Let’s go over some of these hip Twitter terms to spare you any time and confusion.

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With over 110 million Americans actively using social networks (Anderson Analytics), there’s clearly a huge audience, but how can this benefit a medical practice? Here is a list of some of the many ways your practice can benefit from actively engaging in online social networking: (more…)

By now you have heard of sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Myspace. These sites are being used by millions of people everyday and have quickly changed the way the world communicates and shares information. (more…)