Tips and Benefits of Social Networking
Social networking is powerful when you understand the benefits (and recognize potential negatives) to investing your time and efforts across social sites. We have put together the top 5 tips and benefits of social networking for those in the medical and healthcare industry.
Build Your Brand
There are many benefits to social networking on multiple networks, while a main focus, and our number one tip, is about using the social power of a variety of sources to 
build your brand. Introduce yourself: expose yourself.
Remember to build YOUR brand and be careful about the time and effort you invest. Diversify yourself across a variety of social networks rather than spending all of your time in one area.
The absolute best way to begin building your brand is on YOUR own Website!
Use brand power — your brand, your company brand, your industry brand:
Social Networking is the perfect environment to leverage ‘brand power’. In other words, there’s your brand (You), your company (business) brand, your niche brand (specialty), and your industry brand. Therefore, promote and connect all four and watch your presence and business grow.
Diversify Your Social Media Efforts:
There are literally thousands of websites to perform activities for branding purposes. Certainly, the growth of social networks is everchanging. Keep up to date on the new and emerging social sites. Start with a couple of the established and well branded social networks. A few established social sites include Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook.
There are additional benefits when back-links are provided from reputable websites to your website. Additionally, many website ranking tools utilize activities on social sites. Good social efforts will also be helpful with building your SEO. SEO is another key element to building your brand through Social Media.
One of the most important things to Remember when investing your time to build your presence on social networks
Most social networks grant users a limited, revokable, nonexclusive, right to access the site. This means the social network owns the service. Above all, they can shut down your account at any time and you may have no recourse.
In addition, consider the time you’re investing – particularly if you are primarily focused on one site. Do you remember when MYSPACE was king of the hill? And along came some competition – facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin…. What happens to all the work you have invested if you haven’t diversified your social marketing? With each social network, you never know what their shelf life will be! Spend enough time to present a positive image and move on. Be careful not to spread yourself too thin either.
In one of our groups on LinkedIn, a group member presented that he utilized the LinkedIn messaging system exclusively to communicate with his customers! A flurry of questions came from other members – and we are sure you can come up with a few on your own! What happens when LinkedIn closes down your account? In other situations, what happens if free messaging goes to paid messaging? There are always considerations to be made with any social site. Ask yourself, What happens if……
Impact of social media efforts on the rank of a website
The results of your social media efforts will have an impact on your brand, good or bad, depending on your efforts. In 2015, we performed a case study of the Impact of Social Media on website rankings. This case study was monitored for a company that took notice of rankings on MedCepts.com and brought it to our attention. The company requested our assistance to help them to improve the rank of their website. A tribute to our members reflects a few statistics of MedCepts.com. The statistics reflect 3,000 visitors A DAY with over 96,000 visits a month. Similarly, the outside statistics reflected amazing ranking as compared to other websites across the globe. The numbers that impressed MedCepts team members was the 31 page views per visit with the visitor on the site for over 37 minutes.
A Case study on MedCepts.com by a WKU Graduate student concludes– “MedCepts is top in their field, when compared nationally and globally among millions of websites…”
YOUR SOCIAL ACCOUNT – is it really yours?
You think your account is YOUR ACCOUNT. Here is an example of a LinkedIn user account that was restricted, meaning NO ACCESS to their account. There are many reasons this could happen, but primarily as the result of a learning process for most users. Keeping up to date with terms of the various social networks can help prevent losing your accounts.
