Social media has the potential to be an extremely effective tool in helping your pharmacy connect and communicate with your community, letting them know which products and services you can provide them with.

Here are some top tips for the most popular social platforms, to help you become more effective online:

Facebook - top tips

• Set up an event page for your health awareness events and invite people from your local community to attend.
• Ask customers to leave positive reviews on your business page.

Twitter - top tips

• Utilise peak times. As a general rule, try to tweet between 1pm and 3pm Monday to Thursday. Avoid 8pm - 9am as this tends to be the least effective time. Schedule Tweets using Hootsuite.
• Use the @ to tag other users in a tweet and join in a conversation.
• Use hashtags (#) to make your tweet searchable, and link it to other popular subjects.

LinkedIn - top tips

LinkedIn is used in more of a professional capacity and therefore is popular in business to business communications, rather than as a marketing tool to consumers.

However, you can reap benefits from creating a personal account and using it as the pharmacy owner to:

• build a business support network.
• start talking to other businesses about the services that you can offer to them or their staff.

You could:

• Connect with businesses in your local areas; offer your flu vaccination and care home services.
• Publish blog posts about the benefits of your services to businesses. It may prompt some of your business contacts to get in touch to find out more.

Instagram - top tips

Instagram is a photo or video sharing social networking platform that uses the same 'followers' mechanism as Twitter.

Many see Instagram as a fun and quirky method of sharing your experiences.

• Use it to create a visual campaign around your health awareness events by posting regular photo updates.
• Use it to promote positive examples of customers who have benefitted from your services eg, quit smoking, lost weight etc. inspirational posts are popular on Instagram.
• Promote your retail offering by picturing your latest deals, promotions and any new products.

Handy social media shortcuts

• Pick just one or two channels that work best for you, this will mean you aren't trying to spread your time too thinly, and the work you do put in will be more impactful.
• Utilise a content management website such as Hootsuite. This means you can write and schedule your posts in advance at a time convenient to you. You can manage up to three channels using the free profile.
• To reach a bigger audience more quickly, you can sponsor your page or sponsor posts on all of the above platforms. This is usually on a pay per click or pay per view basis and is very flexible to accommodate all budgets.
• Keep an eye on your analytical reports. These will help you spend more time on the things that work and stop doing things that have less impact.

Take a look at more social media support

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