They are constantly making changes to their news feed algorithm to determine what types of posts and ads will reach more people.
In the past, most of the changes have been focused on limiting spam, link bait, and fake news. All of these changes have had limited to no effect on upper cervical practices ability to use Facebook effectively to reach people in their communities.
But if your upper cervical practice has been utilizing Facebook to connect with and attract new patients into your practice then it’s important to understand the changes that happened with Facebook recently and will continue to happen with Facebook going forward and how those changes may impact your practice and marketing strategy.
Most of the recent changes are connected with privacy. You may be aware that Mark Zuckerberg the Founder and CEO of Facebook recently appeared in front of Congress to discuss concerns about privacy when a data mining company was able to access Facebook user data.
Here’s the big change:
Facebook will limit or stop altogether, advertisers’ access to 3rd party information.
What is this 3rd party information?
Things like income, active credit card users, consumer electronics high spenders, vacation travelers and more.
Now, if you’ve ever advertised on Facebook yourself you’ve seen the seemingly endless segmentation options. For example, if you wanted to connect with people in your community who have migraines and adequate income to afford your service in the past you could segment your ad so that it only was shown to married couples in their 30s, who went to college and who have income of $100,000 per year and who have liked a migraine related page in the past.
Seems brilliant doesn’t it?
Well, unless you are advertising nationwide or to multiple countries and have a very large budget, you’ll not be able to find enough people meeting these criteria to create any meaningful results for your practice.
From our experience, the changes that Facebook is making to the ad platform through 2018 will affect mostly the larger advertisers who were able to profit from these very tight and specific segmentations.
We can confidently say that if you’re an upper cervical practice advertising with us or attempting to do it on your own in your local market (a city or some miles around your practice) you will not be significantly affected by these changes.
You will not be affected because if you advertise locally, then your most effective campaigns will target people with a close proximity to your practice, with age demographics and possibly gender and that type of demographic information is not going away.
So the best case scenario is that all of these news reports are going to chase out amateur Facebook advertisers who drive up costs and will leave even more opportunity for professional Facebook advertisers who actually know what they’re doing…like us :-).
If you want to learn more about how we use Facebook advertising as part of our comprehensive online marketing strategy to help upper cervical doctors improve their online presence, attract more new patients, improve referral conversion, and retention give us a call at 877-252-1230 to have a five-minute screening conversation about your practice.
