Thank you very much, and, and thank you to the webinar vets, for, inviting me to speak here tonight. So, social media, we, we talk to vets about social media all the time, at Vet Help Direct. And we get a lot of really positive comments about how their Facebook page is doing, and about the engagement that they're getting, the way they're talking to owners.
And when we look at vet's Facebook pages, we see really great things going on. We see people engaging with their vets, we see, them achieving a lot of reach and a lot of engagement. But in between all these positive comments that we get from vets talking about how, how great the Facebook page is, there's always that doubt.
I'm not sure what it's doing for the business. I'm not sure why we're doing it, but we're doing it. So we thought it would be really interesting, to try and quantify the effects of social media on the veterinary business.
And, and obviously, that's sort of, you're never gonna get a 100% accurate answer, but we thought it would be interesting to look in more detail at the factors, that would go into that. So in this presentation, I'm gonna start by looking at what opportunities there are for vets with social media and, and what effects we believe social media can have, on the veterinary practise, as a business. We're then going to look at what's involved in bringing those opportunities about what type of investment you need to make as a veterinary practise, to get the maximum effect from social media.
Next we're gonna look at what parameters because obviously we're gonna need measurements to calculate a return on investment. And then we're gonna look at ways of looking at how what the return might be and estimating, what that's likely to be for a veterinary practise. So the opportunity, we believe, about Heart Direct that you can use social media to educate, gain, and retain, ideal clients.
And we're gonna break that down and, and look at those three opportunities, in more detail. Along with some qualitative evidence as well, because I think it's fair to say that most veterinary practises and, and certainly here at Vet Health Direct, we see day in, day out huge amounts of qualitative evidence that social media is helping the veterinary practise. So our first aim that we think vets should be really be sort of trying to achieve with social media is educating their clients.
We believe that better educated, owners make better clients. And I think that's really, that's always been a traditional value of, of veterinary practises. Even before the internet, an owner needs to understand the requirements and needs of its pet, of their pets or, or animals to be able to bring them into the vet for the attention that they require.
And they need to be able to spot symptoms, that mean that their pet, or, horse might need, some veterinary attention. So we see, we use Facebook on behalf of our clients all the time, to try and educate, their clients. And this is an example of the, type of post, that we make.
This is one about Alabama rot. So we try, we try to present the educational information in, in different ways. And this is really my first sort of bit of qualitative evidence that social media, might help the veterinary practise, because you can see there that this post has reached 157,000 people.
So 157,000 people have seen that post and read it. And This post isn't really advertising the vet practise. It's not, in any way promoting it.
But what it's showing is the brand, it's showing the logo, and it's also positioning this veterinary practise as the local resource for pet health information in the area. And I think that's really important. That's naturally appear to be the offline expert on, on vet, on pet health, if anyone's worried about their pets.
The first thing they're gonna do is pick up the phone, and, and ring their vet if they're thinking about it in an offline way. But when owners are looking online for information about their pets, that's not necessarily the case. And I think it's really crucial that we as a profession move into that space, so that we can continue to advise and help owners and, and help to help them to understand how crucial we are, for the health and wellbeing of, of their pet.
Here's another example. So this poster only reached, 2300 people, and this is the funny thing with internet statistics. You start saying it only reached 2000 people, but actually that's, that's huge, brand exposure for this veterinary practise, in the local area.
They've had, 91 people reacting to the post, and 4 comments on it. And this seems to be a really great way to educate people because, and, and the reason that we think that is because of the way that people engage with the post. We also sometimes get tips, we also sometimes get, feedback from owners directly on the vet's Facebook pages that we help to run.
This is a really good example, saying, you know, thank you for your tips for keeping our pets well. But as with most things, more often than not, you don't hear that type of feedback, but you can infer it from the reaction that people have had with it. This is, just an example of the types of other more evidence people taking on them that message.
We've asked them, instead of forcing information at them and becoming a sort of one-way publishing, output, we're asking people to engage and to give us the reasons, give us the considerations that they would have when getting a new dog. And I think there's a lot of evidence that people. Learn a lot better when they're, asking questions, when they're talking back, when they're engaging with a piece of information.
So I think this is pretty good evidence that these people are taking in these messages, and they're talking to each other, they're learning from each other, about what's involved, in getting a new dog. And, another example here, of, really how we, the real benefit of social media in education, which is that you can give very similar pieces of information many, many times to the same audience, just by presenting it in different ways, to maybe telling a story about that piece of information. Maybe presenting that information as an image, maybe presenting it in one, with one particular skew.
So this post here is about rabbits eating a pile of hay, rabbit's diet, what they need to eat to be healthy. And then the same practise, this you can see that this wasn't very, this was on in May, then the same practise in August, then reinforcing this message, about. Rabbit diet and how crucial and important it is.
And, and we all know ourselves that, you know, from our experiences, maybe at school, from your experiences, you know, in life generally, it's, it's sometimes really hard to take in information the first time you hear it. But if you hear that information in different ways, drip fed to you, it's so much easier, to take that information on board. We also asked, people, just going back to education for a few moments, we've just run a survey of 1000 people, at the National Pet Show, and we can't, we haven't published that data yet and we are planning on publishing it.
But we asked people why they followed their vet on social media. And we found that the most important reason or the most common reason that people followed their vet on social media was to keep, up to date with any health updates that their vet might have for them. And, and when we saw that, our team was actually quite surprised, because what we find generally when we post information about pet health, is that it can be really hard to get people to engage with it.
And you, you know, I've just demonstrated ways that we have of getting people to engage, but you have to work that little bit harder, to get people to engage with health information. So it was actually really surprising that that was the biggest reason. But when we started to look back at the health posts, we realised that they were intrinsically harder for people to engage with.
So it's really nice to know that actually pet owners want to read this information, and just because they may not always engage with it quite as much as when you've got a really cute picture of a kitten or you've got, a really funny video. People want to hear, want to know it, know it, they want to hear from you, they want to be educated, and it's one of the reasons that they're following you on Facebook in the first place. We also believe that social media can be used to gain new clients for the practise.
And, again, we see qualitative evidence of this the whole time, and I'm sure that you guys listening, that you have the same experience where you're always getting questions, from people asking, if they can register, asking people, asking for information. And generally, if you help people out, you talk to them, you answer their question, 9 times out of 10, they will follow the advice, to call you, and to get an appointment booked. And, you know, in the early days, one of the things, the reasons that vets commonly didn't want to go straight into social media was because they wanted their clients to call them.
They didn't want them to ask questions, over social media. But actually, what we find with experience is that people see this asking a question. As the first step that they need to do before they then make a phone call.
They have an instinct to look things up online, search for things, and it's only once they've done that, they've done their bit of research that they're then very happy to call the vet. We've been running Twitter and Facebook to the public now for, nearly 10 years. And nearly every answer that we give.
Advises owners to call the vet. And we've never once had anybody say to us, Oh, you're just trying to get us to call the vet. They're always really happy and grateful for our advice.
It's simply that they first want to do their research, they first want to educate themselves, they want to find out the the the facts for themselves using the internet. And then Facebook can also be used in a much more explicit, advertising way. This is Limere's vets in, in Stoke on Trent.
And they were very keen to push their, laparoscopic bit space. They had a fantastic response to this advert. And of course, Once you start using Facebook for very explicit promotions, it's also very easy to then measure the effects that Facebook is having.
But I think the danger is, is to think that that's the only effect of Facebook, because, yes, we've got lots of laparoscopic space booked in in response to this advert. But that I feel is only a tiny part of the effect that Facebook is having for the practise in generating this community of pet owners around the practise and seeing their friends, engage, with the practise and seeing the relationship that they have. We all know, that word of mouth recommendations, are one of the best ways of getting new clients.
And on social media, this can just happen on a much bigger scale, because you can see friends engaging with the vet practise. And friends on Facebook, you might not have seen them for 5 or 6 years, but you're still, you still think, oh, right, they use that vet, they have a good relationship with them. And subconsciously, that message, is, goes in.
Retain, I, I personally think this is probably one of the most powerful, ways that Facebook can help, with the veterinary business in retaining new clients. And of course it is, is often overlooked. I think it is actually more valuable.
To retain a client, than to get a new client, because that retained client is, first of all, it's easier to, to take them on. It's somebody that knows your practise, and is maybe far more likely to stay with you, after the sort of initial consultation. And what we find, with, with Facebook for veterinary practises, I don't know if any of you guys have had the experience where you've, you just in your personal lives, you've had a friend, and you've not seen them for maybe 10 years, but you're.
Following them on Facebook, your friends on Facebook. I have quite a few friends like that. And I feel like I'm still almost in touch with them.
I feel like I know what's going on in their lives. I know what their children look like. I know what, where they live.
I know what they're up to. And it's kind of sad to say, but I've also got friends that I haven't seen for 10 years that aren't on Facebook. And I've almost sort of semi-forgotten that we were friends.
I've got no idea what they were doing, they're doing. I don't have a mental image of what they look like, what the children look like, where, where, you know, what pets they've got, where they live. So I just feel very disconnected from those people.
And what we see with the communities that our clients build on Facebook is that same connection when clients are talking and engaging with the vet practise day in, day out. And it comes to the time for the vaccination, they're not gonna start thinking, oh, well, maybe I could get it slightly cheaper somewhere else, I'll call around, which is behaviour that actually we're having instilled into us from sort of insurance, car insurance and things like that. It's just a natural reflex.
They know the practise. They're seeing day in, day out, what's going on there, and there's no question in their mind. And, and I think that that's why it's such a powerful way to retain clients.
And, the communities that form around vet practises that really put a lot of time and effort into their Facebook pages. Are just so warm and vibrant and friendly, and the vet practise, is at the centre of that community of local pet owners, and it's an incredibly powerful tool. Don't forget, when you're thinking about preventing lapsed clients, that, obviously, text messaging and, and, emailing reminders is also a really, really powerful way, to retain clients.
We do quite a bit of work with IRecall, and their text messages, obviously incredibly powerful as well, working alongside that social media community. So, how do you build up that kind of community, and it's really a case of showing that you understand how your community feel. And this is just an amazing, ad advertisement for gaining those clients whose friends have seen their friends engaging with a vet that's Writing this kind of post that's showing that they understand how their clients feel about their pets.
This is the London Cat Clinic, which is, an amazing place, and, Jeremy has got an amazing vision behind it, and that vision comes out in, in pretty much every post, that they do on Facebook. So you can see there that, that, that message is getting is being drip fed to the community, so they're being reminded day in, day out, what a great vet practise this is, so that when it comes to, annual health check time, there's no doubt in their mind which practise they're gonna call. And, and then another example here from, Penmelo Vets, you can see this, equine vets, this one's reached 2000 people.
It's just really forming this really strong bond with the community, getting people to engage, and that's the really crucial thing, getting people to contribute to this community. So we just, . This is a, a silly example of the type of paste, that we have written on behalf of Pen Mellon, that's, say, describe your horse using emojis.
And I thought I'd share it with you because it was just really quite funny, especially if you look at the top one of the horse is a pig and a monkey, but actually, they really love them, and sometimes they win them trophies, and they give them bandages on their head. And then the next one made us laugh as well as the, the horse, going to France. So then, the owner ending up in hospital and lots and lots of money being spent one way or another, which we can't quite work out how.
And then what you find is different members of the community talking to each other, and, making it into a really, vibrant community. So you'll notice that I've been talking about Facebook, a lot, and that I haven't really been talking about any other type of social media. .
And that's, we find that basically, time that you put in to Facebook, we tend to get so much more back than any other platform. And this is a sneak preview, which I shouldn't, shouldn't really have out until we've, we've published our research, but this is when we asked our 1000, pet owners, But it, what, social media they used. We didn't all this, there's like a lot more questions later on as to if they follow their own vets.
You can see here, absolutely fascinating that Facebook is the leading platform by quite some distance. I think it's really fascinating there with the ages that you can see, that around 45 to 50. It social media or Facebook use drops to, around 50% there.
So half the people that are over 45 are going to be using Facebook and half aren't. But a marketing medium that you can reach 50% of your owners by is, is really, you know, by spending a few minutes writing a post is, is quite, is obviously still a very exciting prospect. And you can see there that in the younger generation, that's going up to sort of over 70%, Instagram is something that's, we're seeing a lot more being used by vet practises, and we're help, and we've helped some of our practises to utilise it.
And you can see that you, if you've got a particularly young client base, it might be quite useful for reaching people with your message. So you can see that that sort of just over 20% of, 18 to 24 year olds using Instagram. Probably a bit young for the majority of our client base just at the moment.
But you can see that when it goes to 25 to 34, you've still got sort of nearly 20% of people using it. But still, when you compare that sort of broad, general reach that you're gonna have with Facebook, it's just, you know, still very small. We also find Facebook's more useful for getting across those educational messages, for getting across those slightly promotional messages.
And just to give you another insight into our research before we've actually published it, we've also discovered, that people are more likely to follow their own vet on Facebook, on Instagram, they're much more likely to follow the another vet than they are to follow their own vet. And again, it It fits with what we see, on Facebook, where people have to use their own identity. It's a lot more personable.
And, and, that seems to just work for some reason, far better for veterinary practises, and they end up, with people following them, who are their own clients or relevant people. So that's what we feel the opportunity is. So now, obviously, we need to look at what's involved in creating all those opportunities, because to use Facebook in an effectively, so that you are educating, your, clients and your potentials.
Clients, you're gaining clients, ideal clients that you want for your practise by clients that are attracted by what you're talking about and your tone of voice, and you're also retaining your existing clients. This requires a fair bit of effort, and, and some budget, some investment. So I've broken this down into two, parts, Facebook management.
The day to day managing of Facebook and Facebook ads. So Facebook ad management, why is this so important? And I think it's just worth us having a very brief recap of how the Facebook algorithm works, just to make it clear why we think it's so important, the, the different aspects of, of Facebook management.
So Facebook tell us when you log on to Facebook, there's about 1500 things that Facebook could show you. That might seem like a lot, but remember the games, that can post to Facebook, the automatic updates from, exercise, runs that people have been on. There's a lot of automated updates.
And also people nowadays have got more friends than they ever used to have on Facebook. You sort of built up a historic, set of friends, and people post a lot more frequently than they used to. So Facebook have a genuine, problem here, because, you know, probably 90% of that 1500 is stuff that probably you're not going to be that interested in.
I have seriously got no interest in how someone's farm is getting on, in a Facebook game that they're playing. I, and whilst it's nice to know how far your friends have run, getting regular updates on that. Probably isn't top of the agenda.
So Facebook needs to find a way of working out what people are actually interested in seeing, because their single aim is to make being on Facebook a great experience. So they have to, they tell us, whittle that down to about 300 things, that they could show you. And with those 300 things, there's another ranking process that then goes on so that to find out what order you're going to be showing those things in.
And these are the factors, that go into deciding, first of all, what 300 things Facebook are gonna to show clients, and then deciding what order those posts are going to be shown in. And you can see right at the top there, time from the post is, is a really huge factor. And it, it just makes a lot of sense.
If you post something, and then someone that that follows your page, doesn't log on to Facebook for two weeks, they're not going to see your post because in those two weeks, they're gonna have had so many more recent posts from their friends, posts from other pages. Frequency of interaction again, it makes complete sense from Facebook's perspective. They think, right, this person is interacting and engaging a lot with this page, or a lot with this friend.
They are interested in this person or they are interested in this page. So I will make sure that they see more posts from this person. And, and you'll notice that, that it, you know, you'll notice the effect in the algorithm that your friends, your really good friends that you are happy to engage with, you'll see sort of top and you'll see sort of almost everything that they post.
So you can see here a sort of slight danger, because we were just saying that clients don't engage all that much with health and educational posts all the time. So you can see the danger of that, that Facebook could think, oh, they're not interested in that post, because they have no way of knowing that you've read it, you've taken it on board. All they know is whether you've engaged with it or not.
The type of post goes into the algorithm, so is it a video, an image or text post. Has the post been hidden or reported because that might signal that it's an unpleasant thing that people don't want to see. They might stop showing that post.
And then the final point, which is the real, unfortunate one for, for our veterinary practises, is that pages are less important than people. And they brought this into the algorithm, in about 2013. And when that happened, we saw all of the Facebook pages that we managed for veterinary practises drop down, plummet hugely in their reach, all in the space of a week.
It had a huge impact, on the algorithm. And one of the reasons that they did it was this user experience, but there's another big reason as well, and that's Facebook ads. And it's because Facebook make nearly all their revenue from Facebook ads.
So if you think what a huge gigantic business Facebook is, yet 95% of their revenue comes from ads. You can see that they need to make people want to use ads, and this was one method of pushing people into doing that. So I'm just gonna go through a few definitions with you before we look, at how we can sort of, manipulate that algorithm, and how that impacts on what work we need to do to manage the Facebook page effectively.
So reach engagement and likes are three metrics I'm gonna be talking about quite a bit in this next bit of the presentation. So reach is the number of people that have seen your content. So that could be usually in their news feed when they've logged on.
It could be because they visited your Facebook page and they've looked at your content. Engagement is when somebody likes, comments, or clicks on your post. And the number of likes is what obviously when somebody's clicked like on your page.
And then they become somebody that that will see posts from your page in their news feed, potentially. If they don't like your page, there's no way they can see your posts unless one of their friends engages with the post. If they, one of their friends likes it.
So, when we're looking to start measuring Facebook, we tend to look at, the number of users that are engaged over 28 days, because this just gives us, a, a measure then that we can, get used to. We can work out whether it's high or low for a veterinary practise, and we can compare the progress of a page, over the course of a year. Whereas if you're just looking at the engagement on one day, it can change so much, it's not very useful.
So you can see, I said before, if someone likes your page, then they can see, your posts in your newsfeed potentially. And if somebody, engages with one of your posts, then their friends can also see the post. So that's what the, there's only two ways that you can see somebody's content on Facebook.
Either because you've liked their page, or because one of your friends has liked it and they've engaged with it. So you can see that for to get the number of people that have seen content from your Facebook page up, which is your reach, you need to increase your likes and increase your engagement. And then going back to the algorithm now that we were just looking at where it's gonna be a what Facebook chooses to show people is going to be affected by how long it is since they, they've posted, we need to post really frequently because that's gonna maximise our chance of being, of our post being there just when somebody else logs on, to Facebook.
The longer we leave it, the less chance there is of people seeing that post because there's gonna be more and more stuff in the way. So we recommend to our vet practises that they post very frequently. But only up to every 4 hours.
If you post closer together than 4 hours, then your latest post sort of cannibalises the last post because Facebook will stop showing your previous post before it would naturally have done so. And then we saw this thing, Facebook can only judge your, how much people like your content by how much people are engaging with it. So really, we believe you should be aiming for engagement on every post.
You can't afford to have many posts that people don't engage with because Facebook will then start labelling your page as one that people are not interested in. And then you need to ensure that content posted by the community is acknowledged and responded to. And we think that's vital, because what we find is that if clients comment or post a picture on Facebook, and then the vet practise doesn't react to it or acknowledge it, then they don't post again.
And we say to our clients, the biggest, the quickest way to pour cold water all over your page is to not respond to comments and not respond to pictures. And one of the most frequent services, that we will say to our vets, look, just let us do this for a month, because we know it's gonna make a massive difference to your page, and we'll do it and No cost because we're so sure of it. And we will do the, what we call community management, which is where we like, comments, we talk back to the community.
So if someone posts a picture of their dog, we will comment on the picture and talk to the clients. And very often we get them to talk back to us, and then we talk back to them again. And we find this most incredible effect, where the engagement increases and increases, and as a result, the reach increases and increases.
So, and I just think also from the perspective of your brand as a veterinary practise, as a caring vet, you don't really want people to be going to all the trouble of taking a picture of their precious pet. Instead of posting it on their own Facebook page, posting it on your Facebook page, and then getting no response. You know, yes, a like can sometimes be enough, particularly when you've had 395 people posting photos of their dog on one post, which is what happened at the weekend, or to one of our veterinary practises.
But, other, other than that, we always try to actually comment and respond to the photos, because we see it as such a big deal that people have bothered to do that and invest in the practise in that way. We talked about how Facebook, gives preference to some types of posts over others. And it does seem that if you don't use video, or Facebook Live and images, you do get more engagement, but not always.
We've had some tiny text past that have done absolutely amazingly. We do experiment with using videos, and, obviously, avoid offensive content, because that might get you unfollowed. And, and it's always a difficult one.
You know, some vets we meet really like posting pictures of, you know, sort of quite gory things and asking people to guess what they are, or, you know, showing them pictures of, the operation in progress. And, you know, sometimes they get a lot of engagement because some of the community really like to see that type of content. But unfortunately, if you're starting to get people unfollowing you, or blocking the content, then it's probably not worth it because that is probably a sign that Facebook's algorithm has taken into consideration that not everyone is enjoying your content.
And then if you remember, the last point that we had on our list was that, pages are more important than people. And the solution to that one, as Facebook have designed, it's to be so is to use Facebook ads. And again, We can really tell almost by looking at a page, whether they've been using Facebook ads or not.
They make a huge difference. They're not the complete answer. You still need a lot of posts that people will engage with.
Very good community management in our, experience seems to make more difference than Facebook ads. But as part of, a strategy, Facebook ads, are essential. They're also very good for when you have those, posts like I showed you with lime trees, where it's overtly promotional, trying to get exposure and reach for that type of post.
So how do Facebook ads work, you set a budget, and the ads stop when the budget is used up. You can target them incredibly accurately, so obviously we tend to target to local pet owners. And then there are two types of, ads as, ads for likes or ads for reach.
And in an ideal world, we will do both. I'm just gonna show you here, this one here is a, ad trying to get people to like the page in the first place. As you remember.
If people don't like the page, then they've got no way of seeing, seeing your content in the first place unless one of their friends likes your page. So we always sort of focus on that if numbers are low. And this is, an example from Lime Trees, is a, advert that focuses on increasing reach.
So you're paying for people to see this content, because not everybody that likes your page is going to see your content every time, and ads help you buy that kind of exposure. So there's two ways to set your budget. So you can either say to Facebook, right, I'm gonna want you to show my ad 1000 times, or you can say to Facebook, I'd like you to get me 30 people to like my page.
And we find universally with every vet practise we've ever worked with, that if you budget by impressions, you get far more for your money. And I think that's because if you show, we're just really lucky as vets with our content, because it's so engaging, people love it. And if you share 1000 pet owners, some, the type of content that vet practises tend to show, they'll get far more engagement than than average.
So you end up with far more people liking, by saying, please show my advert 1000 times than you do by saying, OK, I'll pay you until you've found me, you know, 30 people to like my page. So, 3 tips for Facebook ads, as I said, budget for impressions, and make sure your ads are highly targeted. You don't want to be, paying for people to see your Facebook ads, if they're not relevant to your practise, and monitor and tweak.
So, Really, I've Gone through all of, all of that, all of those, aspects of running a Facebook page, and you can start to see all of the work that's going to be involved in running the page to maximum effect. So, we've talked about posting, you're gonna be posting, you know, as many times a day as you can, at least once a day, up to every 4 hours. You're gonna be responding and engaging, your clients, you're gonna be making sure that you're talking to people.
You're gonna be, creating Facebook ads. You're gonna be setting the budget, you're going to be making sure they're highly targeted. So you're gonna be creating different sets of adverts, dog adverts for dog people, cat adverts for cat people, and then you're going to be monitoring and tweaking.
And so you can start to see the type of, investment that's going to be involved in that. So, and then we're moving on now to the sort of measuring section, of this, and how are you going to measure, the performance of the Facebook page. And I just wanted to show you just the easiest type of measuring we've ever had to do, which is when you're using Facebook, for a startup.
Because we actually started running Facebook for the London Cat Clinic one month before they opened their doors, which was an amazing experiment for us because it meant that all the new clients that registered, had either come from Facebook or come from the PR, that the, the London Cat Clinic were running. So it was a great way to very directly be able to measure the impact that Facebook was having. So we, as I say, started one month before they opened, and this was the first post we ever rate for the London Cat Clinic.
And you can see that it reached 561 people. So, again, internet statistics, it's very easy to go, oh, you know, only 500 people. But actually, that's incredible.
You know, we spent, it's a small investment writing one post, and you've straight away you've reached 500 people. And that would have been because people would have seen it, they would have shared it with their friends. They would have liked it, and then their friends would have seen it.
And we were also running. Another reason lots of people saw it is that we were running Facebook ads. So we were paying Facebook, to get people to like the page, and to get paying Facebook to make sure that everybody likes the page, sees this post.
So we posted, daily for the London Cat Clinic, for a month. And we responded and engaged the community. We talked to them, we tried to nurture every little thing that somebody said.
We would, sort of try and engage them in a conversation, show that we really cared about their cat, and try, to, portray the, the passion that the London Cat Clinic has, for the, the, feline only, approach, to veterinary, to, to feline medicine. So this was on their opening day, and you can see very big difference that that post reached 18,891 people instead of 560. So you can see the gigantic impact of starting Facebook a month early, and nurturing that community, talking to them, engaging.
And, they also had a, a considerable number of clients already registered. I think it was over 200 clients registered. So we were able to measure, sort of, very accurately, the impact that Facebook had had.
And this was, I just like showing this graph, just because it's, it's pretty cool. So that shows how the likes on the page increased over time. So you can see there the sort of blip, on opening day.
And that was massively helped by the fact that they had, Bob the Street cat come to open the practise. But you can see the sort of steady effect there of Facebook ads. And when we wrote the post on this day, the ad budget was the same as on this day.
The difference was, is that we'd built up the people that liked the page so that more people could possibly see it, and we'd built up the community, around the page. So that, that was a sort of accumulation of all those effects. Other key performance indicators we've just already been through, so reach, engagement, and likes.
And, that's the sort of Facebook. So these are the sort of Facebook type metrics that, we, you can look at on a daily basis. You can see how those metrics are changing.
The key performance indicators that our clients generally want us to take into consideration are things like new client acquisition, lapsed clients, or performance of target areas in the like the laparoscopic space that I showed you earlier. So this is great, and this is really what we want to achieve. We love it when we have a KPI that we need to aim for.
But if we solely focus on new client acquisition as our measure of success for Facebook, it's not enough. And that's because there are so many other factors that will play into new client acquisition, such as the sort of client experience in the practise, . Another marketing.
And unless you've got a really pure situation like we had with the London CAT clinic before they opened, you can't really, use it. It's not quick enough. It doesn't change fast enough for us to work out, what's working and what isn't working.
And that's the real joy of digital marketing, is that it's all measurable. So you can see straight away if something that you're doing is working, and you can see, conversely, if something you're doing isn't working. A new client acquisition doesn't change fast enough for that to be useful.
So what we do is we take, usually engagement and likes, and we use that as a metric. And what we find is that it very closely mirrors these other KPIs that we're aiming for. So we'll find that the engagement is mirroring the new client acquisition and how that's changing month to month.
And we'll, and we'll find that maybe the likes has some effect as well. Well, I really really like engagement because it's a, it shows people. If they've liked, commented, or clicked, we reckon that they're pretty bought into this Facebook community.
And engagement is naturally a reflection of the people that like the page, because the more people that like the page, the more people that can potentially see your content. So we find that by following these social media KPIs, we get a really good idea of how these top-level KPIs are doing as well. And obviously, it's really nice when you're doing something very specific, like that laps say, to get the, get those figures back as well, because you can tell that that's almost entirely due to Facebook.
So that's, but what you're not taking into consideration with something like that is this incredible, thing that you're building up with this community that's there ready and waiting for any future targeted areas that you want to, promote. So we started to look, so that just wanted to give you sort of a few costs, of how much things are likely to cost. And we've done quite a bit of, research on the data that we have, from running Facebook ads.
And we've found, worked out some averages. So we've worked out that on average, it's gonna cost you about 50 pounds using Facebook ads to get about 60 new likes for your page. And it's going to cost about 30 pounds to get 400 people to engage with your post.
Obviously, there's a lot of variation on these averages because clearly you could advertise a really horrible post that was nobody was going to engage with, and it would cost you then a lot more than 30 pounds to get 400 people to engage with it. But these are averages, so I thought it was just useful sort of benchmark, for people to have in mind. So moving on to the return on investment calculations, so obviously, to work out a return on investment, we need to know what the investment is and what the costs are, and then we need to know the return, which is the profit, that is made, from the extra business that you've bought into the practise as a result of the marketing activity that you're doing.
So we talked about the costs, the sort of activities that you're gonna need to do, to keep your Facebook page, to maximum effect, posting, say, writing and scheduling posts on a regular basis. Content writing, if you're gonna be doing the educational type posts, you're gonna need somebody with a veterinary background, and a, usually a veterinary qualification, to write those posts. .
And from an efficiency point of view, that doesn't necessarily have to be the same person that's posting. You're gonna need somebody responding to all the comments and photos that come in, and then you're gonna need, somebody running your ads, say, Facebook ad management. So we calculate that for a practise to run that, is gonna be about 20 hours a month, to post frequently enough to get the maximum out of Facebook.
And, you know, obviously with the posts, you know, I've shown you quite a few there where there's actually quite a bit of graphic design going into those posts as well. And an ad budget of at least 90 pounds a month. So those are the types of costs that we're going to be looking at.
And I also thought it would be useful to share the cost, of our agency running a Facebook page for a month, but this would be in combination with the vets doing some posts. So we post every single day to the practise page. We manage the ad campaign, we create new targeted ad ads each month.
And our veterinary, qualified, or, practise manager staff are there responding and engaging to the community 365 days a year, keeping the community alive and freeing up staff to write those posts that only they can write when. Clients come in, taking pictures in the waiting room and doing the posts, whatever posts they find easiest will sort of fit around them. But basically, I've, I've shared that number with you, because I think then that's an easy number to use as a value for how much money you're investing.
Whether you're using an agency or not, you're probably investing around 460 pounds a month in running your Facebook page. That's not including our budget. So, oh, should the post should be there.
So then we started to get somewhere close, to looking at the returns. So, we, looked at a sort of, this is getting a Facebook engagement of 20,000 people per month. Is quite a mature Facebook page.
It's one that's been running for quite a while, and with this type of input that I was just describing, say, posting every day, running Facebook ads, responding and engaging to everything that comes in. So we estimate that if 20,000 people engage with a Facebook page each month, we thought, well, what would happen if we assumed that just half a percentage of those people were prevented from becoming a lapsed client. And I think, I wanted to, create a, a sort of estimate that was almost sort of definitely true.
So I've gone on the side of being cautious, because I think that it must be probably slightly over 0.5% of the people that engage. That are prevented from becoming a lapse client.
Because when you think of engaging as somebody going through all the trouble of commenting on something that you've written, liking or clicking more. So, of all of those people doing that every month, if we just say that half a percentage of those are prevented from becoming a lapsed client, because they've got your practise in the top of their minds. So that would give you 100 clients every month that were prevented from becoming lapsed, from that Facebook engagement of 20,000 per month.
Maybe some of those people engaging and not in the area. When we look at the demographics of people engaging on our clients' Facebook pages, it tends to be the case that that at least 85% of them are people that live locally. It tends to be quite accurate.
But let's, let's use this as a ballpark figure, so we're saying that 100 clients every month are prevented from becoming lapsed by Facebook. And then we multiply that by the average revenue of the client, of, of a client for that practise. And then we multiply it by the lifetime of the practise, and then by the profit ratio, and that should give you the revenue, the, return that you have generated, from.
Running Facebook. So, and that would give a return of 9000 pounds, using, average revenue per client of 300 pounds and a lifetime of 3 years and a profit margin of 10%, which is all pretty typical, sort of, values for a UK vet practise. And the costs, to remind you there, we were estimating is, 460 in terms of time that you've put into it, with a 90 pounds Facebook ad budget.
So you can see that even with those very conservative, estimates, that that Facebook page is delivering a huge return on investment. And, you know, looking at these figures and playing around with them, it was, it was good, and, you know, you sort of look at that and you think that's a, that's a ridiculous return, but And when we talk to our vets and you look at what's going on on the Facebook page, you, you, we find that our vets intuitively know that the Facebook page is doing incredible things for their vet practise. We find people saying things like, well, you know, since, since you've been running the Facebook page, our new client acquisition has gone up, you know, by, by 25, 30%.
But I don't know, maybe that's because it's the summer, maybe it's because it's different. It's hard to know, and it's hard to know. So really, these, these estimates really just Back up what we have a feeling, is, is probably the case, and they seem to back it up quite nicely because you can see you can play with those estimates either way, and you would still be delivering a very solid return on investments.
We then wanted to look in more detail at Facebook ads. So we looked at what if we paid, for 400 people, to engage with a Facebook ad per month. What if, half a percentage of those were prevented from becoming a lapsed client.
And then that would give us, two clients, month that were prevented from lapsing as a result of that particular Facebook ad, just looking at the Facebook ad itself, and that gives a revenue of 180 pounds, with a cost of £30. And as with all, say again, you know, just a, you know, we, we kind of felt like it was value for money, and it felt like, right, but it's just nice to have some numbers behind that. And, you know, the other thing with these, sort of revenue calculations is that, you know, you're assuming that the profit, margin is 10%.
But obviously, if you've got a certain number of vets working for you, you've got a certain number of vet nurses working in the practise, and you're at the stage where those are pretty much fixed costs, and every client that comes in, is improving, is now going in as a, as a sort of extra money straight into the practise. You know, that. Those costs can increase dramatically.
And as the practise grows, the fixed costs, so things like how much you're paying for, the rent of the building, how much you're paying for, admin and things like that, that's all gonna stay the same. And so the profit margin's gonna get higher and higher the, the more the practise grows. So, in conclusion, we know, qualitatively and, and hopefully, I've demonstrated to you qualitatively as well, but I'd be really super interested to hear, anybody's questions and comments on those calculations, at the end of this talk.
Is that social media can be successfully used to educate, gain and retain clients. And, and those are ideal clients, clients that you want to have in your practise, because you're able to communicate so effectively what your values are. Managing a successful practise Facebook page, requires a significant investment of time and money.
And the qualitative evidence tells us that clients like the Facebook and that it can influence their behaviour. And quantitative evidence, along with estimates of conversion rates, show a return on investment, of approximately, I've left that bit out. I didn't work out.
It came out as, over 1000%, so I thought it sounded a bit too much. But it's, yeah, a, a very, very substantial return on investment. So, hopefully people have got questions.
If you think of any questions after the presentation, do feel free to contact me, at Vet Helpd Direct. You can, if you go onto, Vet Hepdirect for vets, which is our website, and you'll find our contact details there, or you can contact me, CZ at vet helpelpdirect.com.
Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thank you, Susie.
Very thorough, very interesting talk. If anybody has got any questions, please post them in the Q&A section or even in the, the live chat as well. We've had one come through about the London Cat Clinic.
So with regards to the London Cat Clinic, how did likes compare with client registrations, acquisitions, and footfall? That's a really good question, which we could work out, because we know how many likes they had at that point in time. And we know how many new clients they had, but I don't know off the top of my head.
But I can, whoever it is, if they'd like to, email me, then I can, get those, that, that figure, because it's a really, really good point, and I should have included that. OK, so that's Ross. If you want to email Susie, you'll get your answer.
Do you notice any difference between large animal and small animal practises in terms of engagement, these reaches, etc. That's a really interesting question. So we don't have many farm animal practises, so I can't really give you a good answer for that.
But we have quite a few equine practises. And We were initially a bit sort of, you know, unsure as we haven't got as many equine as, as, small animal. It's really in the last couple of years that we've, developed, our equine offering.
And we're getting really brilliant results from, from, the equine pages. The, once you can hit on that community, and you could, yeah, what, what's We sort of talk to them in, in, in a way that they're interested and engaged by, and the response is absolutely fantastic. So, in terms of equine, you know, not a huge difference, in terms of farm animal, I can't really help you with, with that too much because we don't actually, look after any farm animal pages, just at the moment.
OK, you showed performance figures, for Facebook. How do you get those? Do they come up automatically or do you have to do something to?
So was that the like reach and engagement? Yeah. Yeah.
So those are, when you're running your Facebook page, you will see a section that says insights. And when you click on there, you will see way too much data that you won't know what to do with it. So what we recommend is setting it to 28 days so that you're always looking at something that's comparable and you get used to the numbers and you get an idea of what's good and what's not good.
So we look at the 28 day engagement, the 28 day reach, and the 28 and the number of new likes that you've had over those 28 days. But do, you know, if you've not been into the insights, do have a really good look around cause there's incredible information there. You know, on the demographics of the people that like your page, you can see where they live.
You can see how old they are, whether they're male or female. You can see what time of the day that those people are online. All stuff that really helps you to understand your audience.
And you can see which posts have been the most popular as well, which is a great learning exercise. OK, thank you. Question from Amy.
We have 4 other competitive practises in a 2-mile radius. Have you got any ideas on the best types of posts to increase new client registration? Well, that's such a, a good question.
And, you know, we quite often, obviously end up working with people that have got a lot of competition around them. And, you know, it's, it, it's really interesting that actually the, the main best approach seems to be almost not to worry about the competition and to concentrate on yourself. What we find with that practises, is that often when we talk to them.
They're really, really passionate about what they do, and they're really passionate about the service that they provide. You know, quite a lot of our, clients will tell us that, you know, the clients have such a good experience when they come in, and it's so different to this practise down the road where this happens and this happens. You know, our practise, our clients, we look after them, you know, maybe they'll say they've got a small team that's been there for a long time.
Maybe they'll say that they've got all the Top equipment, whatever it is, but that's, that's the important thing. That's their brand. And what it's what I would really recommend doing, Amy, is to just really get a very clear idea of what your brand is, and, and how that differentiates you.
And then make sure that everything that you post on Facebook reflects that brand. And if you'd like any help, With that, please do feel free to contact me. And, and we're, we're more than happy to chat.
We, we're always so happy to chat to vets about internet marketing. And, you never feel like you'd need to sort of get anything from us. We'd just be happy to have a discussion.
So do, do get in touch if you'd like some help with that. OK, brilliant. And that all goes back to as well, the vision and the values of the practise, which is what Anthony talked about on the last webinar.
Linking, you know, when you're saying, you know, what's your brand. Exactly. Well, I didn't hear the last webinar, but that sounds like exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah. Anybody's interested, go and watch the last webinar that Antony. Question from Steve, have you got figures for engagement or reach for an average practise not using ads?
So organic engagement. Well, that's an interesting question. Not really, because all of our practises use ads pretty much.
Do you have kind of a before and after, or do you just go straight in and start using ads? Yeah, we would have before, before and afters, and we can see the effect that ads have and we take that off. But obviously, you can, when, when Facebook tells you about the effects that ads have, they're not telling you, it's not telling you about the sort of Building up in the historic effect.
So it's just to explain that a bit more, if you've used ads to, for example, get 30 likes on your page, those 30 people, you know, forever more are gonna potentially be able to see your content. So there's a sort of, and, and you'd only see it as an effect from an ad to start off with. So, We don't have any, I don't have an average, I wouldn't want to sort of make up numbers and that.
I don't have an average at the tip tip of my tongue just yet. But it's something that we would sort of be probably working on. And I don't think we'd ever be able to untangle the effect of ads.
But, but we can see it. And, you know, certainly, if you know, some of the very, very Established pages might not need ads day in, day out, but when practises are starting out from scratch, and that's when they, definitely need to be using ads. OK, right.
Thank you. I've got a couple of questions. I remember reading somewhere where it was saying, if you're setting up a business, they recommended you not to ask all your friends to like your page.
I can't remember the reasoning behind it. But is that true? Because from what you said, likes are very important.
So, relevant likes, are important. So I wonder if that was it, that they were thinking, you know, if your friends are living in different areas of the country, you know, that you want, I think it the having a, an audience of, of people that like your Facebook page and knowing that those people are all relevant is really valuable. Because then you can pay Facebook to show your post to people that like your page, knowing that those are all relevant people.
So I wonder if that's what it is friends aren't relevant. Great. And another question, do you recommend services like Hootsuite, which is where?
Oh, it's a yeah, it's a really good question. So, Hootsuite is really useful. We actually use something different called Agora Pulse, but it's a similar concept.
So what Hootsuite does is it brings in streams from, if you're running several Facebook pages, it's invaluable because you can see all those Facebook pages in one dashboard and you can respond to them in one go. And even if you're running Facebook, say, in Twitter, Instagram, it brings it all into one place so it makes it management a lot easier, and you can set up alerts and things like that. So yeah, I definitely recommend having a real play and a sort of good investigate with, Heat Suite.
Agora Pulse is quite, there's a quite a big fee attached. It's probably not, not worth it. But, Heat Suite, definitely, there's quite a few free options on it.
Yeah. Yeah. OK.
And you mentioned about the calculations. This is a naive question from me. The example you said you gave us 20,000 reaches.
Does that change from month to month, as in the people who it's reaching, or is it effectively the same 20,000 people every month? That's a really good question, and it it does change a huge amount. And that is, you know, you really need to look at it year on year.
To see how you're doing, because, some of the practises, I'll have a a post that goes completely ballistic. Like I was just saying, you know, at the weekend, we had one practise that had 300, I think it was 370 people posting pictures of their pets in response to the post. And obviously, you know, that's not necessarily gonna happen the next month.
So that's going to give you a big peak in in engagement. The figure that we used, actually with engagement, which is always a lot lower than reach, because Re is when you've seen it, the engagement is when you've actually clicked on it or commented on it, or, liked it, or it, sort of expressed an emotion towards it. And so engagement is like kind of a bit harder than, than reach, if you see what I mean.
OK, great. Another question coming in, from Steve, are the new changes to the Facebook pages anything to worry about? It's, it's certainly nothing to worry about, and it is a sort of opportunity.
Our team are really busy at the moment, working out the best way to utilise that for vet practises. And I think we'll be putting a blog out soon about, I think it's sort of half written on, on the best way to utilise those. So could I ask any that is interested in seeing that blog to email me.
It's Suzie. You can see how my name's spelled there, Suzie at Betelpdirect.com.
And I'll add you to our, our, emailing this and just send you a quick email when that blog comes out, so that you can see it, and we'll sort of lay out all the best ways of utilising those changes. Brilliant. OK, thank you.
No, I think we're done. So thank you very much, Susie. .
Really fascinating, as I say, loads of information there for everybody and as Susie said, if you've got any follow up questions, it's Suzie out help helpdirect.com. Is that correct?
Just to make sure. Yeah, that's OK. And then just finally then again to thank the sponsors for the, the practise management series that's the Saint Francis Group, Simply Health Professionals, and 8 Legal.
And I look forward to seeing you again on the next veterinary practise webinar on the webinar vet. Thanks again, Susie. Thank you so much.
Thank you. OK, thanks, everybody. Bye.
