How to Manage the Online Reputation of your Healthcare Business?
Everybody has a voice and an opinion to voice out. Your patients, employees, colleagues or counterparts. Off-late there are more than 40 platforms that have mushroomed just to hear them out. Which indeed is a double sided sword for every brand that’s looking to grow.
“47 percent of consumers say a doctor’s reputation matters” – wainscot media
The internet era has made your patients more informed, everybody wants to know about you before getting to you or opting for your service.
Googling your name is just as good as asking your past patients about your service, both leave an impact on your reputation. Your online presence is largely dominated by your online reputation.
Your online reputation is the most searched information among other factors that bulid your online presence. Your online reputation is that part your reputation that is brutally honest and speaks about your brand wherever mentioned.
Hence, managing to control online reputation is a better way to use your online presence than letting your online reputation control your business.
Control negative and promote positive content:
Promoting positive content about you and controlling negative content is essential to make the online medium work positively for you. The systematic promotion of positive content will get your website to the top-notch link in search links. Controlling negative content through such systematic positive promotion will make you known for the strengths of your organization.
Reviews management
Reviews are known to be the most important part of one’s online reputation. In healthcare, reviews are what your past patients tell about you. Various characteristics may be covered in a review, your past patient can talk about any aspect of your healthcare organization but highlighting and bringing up the most relevant, strong and positive review about you will throw light on the best face of your organization. This is how your online reputation can be effectively managed.
Branding on Social media
Appearing on social media pages is a needful move that has to be handled cautiously. Portraying your organization’s merit factors can effectively reach your target audience. Your patient testimonials, accolades and achievements of your organization can be published in exciting ways on social media web pages. Social media has spaces that let you customize your content and present it in different ways for different people. The in-depth knowledge that you have about your healthcare disciplines can be put out through health tips and procedure explanatory posts.
The only reputation that can reach any part of the world in a jiffy and make the same impact as word-of-mouth is online reputation. To make your online reputation strong and to leverage the online space can be done through strategic methods of management. Online medium is flooded with information but regulating the information and making it find its desired traffic to bring prospects to your organization is important. Let your reputation stay safe from rumours
7 Things you must do as a part of online review management
1. Not just read but analyse
Reviews are more than just somebody’s opinion, they are unfiltered reflections of the result of your service. Every healthcare brand has a promise to make but after shouting it out and aloud it is unfair to not be receptive to feedback on the delivery of the same. Patients talk about you to the world because they think they deserve to be heard not just by you but everyone who wants to know about you.
Pick-up words, phrases, praises and complaints that repeat in your reviews. Track trends and patterns to see why certain factors have been working in favour of you and against you.
2. Share it with your team
Few reviews are directly targeted towards that one doctor, that one department staff or that one aspect of your hospital find that out and let the concerned person know that people are taking them seriously and can now pinpoint even the minutest part of their service in a review.
Tell your team not to get good reviews but to deliver your brand promise and always keep your healthcare brand’s uncompromisable ambition in mind.
3. Make real-time changes with virtual cues
The very purpose of analysing reviews is to drive that impact of patient’s opinion all the way into your hospital. Real-time impact is all that’s required to meet the demands of your patients, like any customer group your patients too have unstated needs but the fact that they are writing a review means they want to tell the world something. Understand their unstated demands, necessities and expectations out of your healthcare business.
4. Look at them as a blessing not menace
Reviews are not the revealers of all your pitfalls to the world. But they are in fact telling you that you here is where you are going wrong so you tweak them with the right purpose in mind. When people put a finger on the problem your battle is half won without your efforts.
They are revealing your market research insights event before you attempt to do one. So please look at reviews from the bright side of it. Also sometimes the fact that somebody is speaking about your brand itself can be a solace factor, remember not to be wounded but positively triggered by reviews that are brutally honest.
5. Dive into more than one platform
It’s not about just Google reviews anymore. Understand that there are equally busy platforms where people can review your service. Eg-Mouthshut.co, Indeed.co and others can play a major role in anew patient’s decision making the process.
6. Encourage positivity
Encourage good reviews by your anybody by saying a very big thank you and sharing it on your social media. People like it when their comment is appreciated so DO IT!
7. Be regular at it!
It’s definitely NOT a one day process where you sit, scroll through and swallow the essence of what your patients want from you. Keep the process regularly going and never stop it for the sake of saturation You never know when you will get an epiphany or enlightenment.
Do’s and Don’ts of online reputation management
| Do’s of Online Reputation Management | Don’ts of Online Reputation Management |
|---|---|
| Reply to every genuine review out there | React to every genuine review out there |
Quote facts and real anecdotes | Give generalistic reply to all the reviews |
| Reply to every genuine review out there | React to every genuine review out there |
Appreciate their effort of writing to you irrespective of good or bad | Pounce back or enter the defense mode for your healthcare brand |
Being transparent at any cost | Trying to sound wishy-washy because certain things are confidential, rather call it confidential |
Put your patients first, when you put them on a pedestal their want of being heard is satisfied | Making everything about your brand and less about your patients |
What you should NEVER even think of doing?
DELETING reviews is a complete no no whatever the case might be.