Navigating Social Media to Support your OT Business

Are you struggling to connect your valuable occupational therapy services with the right clients? 

You're not alone, and this episode of the OTPreneur podcast is here to help. 

Join Jayson Davies and special guest Courtney Lynn from social-ot.com as they dive into the world of social media marketing. Discover the secrets to finding your ideal audience and the strategies to make social media an integral part of your business success. If you're ready to transform your practice and effectively reach your target market, don't miss this episode! Tune in now to unlock the potential of social media for your OT business.

Grab the Resources and Links from this episode at OTPreneur.com/episode28

Would you like more support on your OTPreneur Journey?

⭐️ Join the free OTPreneur Community

📗 Get your free OT Business Guide

📱 Leave us a voice message & you could be featured on the OTP Podcast

📩 Send us an email and let us know how we can support you!

Thanks for tuning in! We'll see you next time

Transcript

0:50

By the end of this course, you'll have the knowledge to build a straightforward and personalized marketing plan for your OT related business. Don't miss out. When you register, you'll have access to the live webinar plus lifetime access to the replay and ongoing support in the OTpreneur community. Ready to transform your practice? If so, then click on the link in the show notes or head over to otpreneur.com/simplemarketing to register now. Now enjoy the rest of this episode. Hey, Otpreneur. Today, we are talking about something that I am admittedly very terrible with, and that is social media. We are super excited today to have a special guest on to come on and share about social media, the differences between all the different social media worlds out there, and how you can find the people that you want and need to find to support your business on social media. So stay tuned, and we'll be on with Courtney from social0t.com in just a moment. Are you thinking about starting an occupational therapy business, but don't even know where to begin? Whether you're starting something on the side or going full time in your business, the OTpreneur podcast is what you need. This show will help you get in the right mindset and give you actionable tips to go from just an idea to OTPreneur. Let's go. Courtney, welcome to the OTPreneur podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. It's wonderful talking to you. I have definitely been watching your social OT platform over on Instagram kinda grow and and just kinda watching how you are supporting OTpreneurs now. And so I'm excited to talk to you all about Instagram, maybe some other social media platforms, and kind of how OT preneurs can use social media to support their business. I hope that sounds good with you. Perfect. And thank you so much for having me. It's great being on here. This is my first podcast, a little bit nervous, but I'm so excited to be here. That's funny, you know, because this is an OT business type of podcast, it's always fun to be able to like share little things like that. Right? Like being nervous, you know, if, if you're doing something related to like OT, right? Like you kind of have to almost be perfect all the time, too. Sometimes it feels like that. But I like OT, talking about business, because it allows us to kind of open up and really like, say, you know what? I'm nervous right now. I'm scared. But as a business owner, I know I can get through that. So I love it. From the from the podcasting side, I love having guests on because I always tell them, like, it's my job to make you feel comfortable. It's my job to help you along, to make you shine. And so to get started, I'd love to learn just a little bit about your background in OT and kind of what led you to starting your own business. I have a master's in occupational therapy. I worked in the pediatric field for thirteen, fourteen years. I was a quota at first and then did a bridge program and stayed in pediatrics that whole entire time. Love it. I found myself creating content for my students and the parents on Canva. So like, I knew Canva really well, and I just loved creating. I'm very creative person. Were you posting stuff on Instagram before you started social OT in terms of, like, were you sharing your ideas at all? No. And I should have. I wish I didn't. I just created for parents and for my students. I Uh-huh. Made, like, fun games for them and, like, integrated their goals within the games on Canva. And then when I had my son, I realized that I couldn't work a nine to five anymore because my son like has so many different needs that I need to be home with him. So I'm like, I need to do something. I still want to stay in the field of OT. I don't want to get out, but I can't really work in the schools anymore. So that's where social OT came from. I took it day by day. I learned the marketing part of it behind, the scenes. I took a lot of courses on marketing and then implemented it. I got some clients for like very like just trial based and went from there and now like sociality is growing. It's, it's a great business. I can't see myself anywhere else right now. So, yeah, it's it's working. It's great. I love it. I love supporting the therapist who need my support because they don't have the time to do this. And that's what I find that most mostly business owners don't have the time to be on social media because they're busy running their business and they're busy, treating clients and all of that. So I take that off of their plate. Absolutely. And I mean, you'd mentioned taking some courses and whatnot. Were you doing a lot of that while still working your pediatric OT job? Or did you just kind of decide, you know what, right now I need to focus on my son. And then while focusing on being a full time mother, basically, which is a job in itself, whereas taking courses or whatnot. No, I, stopped working in the field, became a full time stay at home mom and then started taking courses while I was with my son. So social OT came after my son. Mhmm. And after like maternity leave and all of that. So Wow. You've done this pretty quickly then. That's awesome. So when you decided ultimately, alright, I I want to go into social media. First of all, you said you created content, but actually doing social media as a business is very different from creating social media content. So how do you go from I'm creating content for my parents to I want to create content for others as a business. I saw a huge gap in that marketing field between OTs and social media. And I know how much OTs can put out there and they can all of that information that they can tell the parents or their target audience, like, whoever they're trying to to reach. I know that they can get that out there, but and and I'm an OT, so I know what to get out. So I found that gap and I'm like, okay, I can create posts for businesses. I can do all of this. I can do the copywriting. I did take copywriting courses to make sure that, like, I'm, I'm saying the right things and all that, but I just knew that there was that gap and I went, I went from there. Courses are so important. Obviously in occupational therapy, we have to get a lot of professional development every year to keep our license, but even outside of the world of OT as a marketing, yeah, you've got to take your courses. Right? You you don't just get knowledge, and AI doesn't have the answer to everything. You've got to you've gotta get on, and you've gotta learn a lot. And what I love about OT is you kind of alluded to is that OTs are really starting businesses right now. OTAs as well, OT practitioners in general, were really starting businesses. And you're right. There is that gap between, I know that I can help people, to I can market myself to others to show them that I can support them. Right now, within entrepreneurship and OTs based, I'm seeing kind of two different types of entrepreneurs. I'm seeing those with a therapy business, we'll call it that, where they're actually providing services, whether it be online, in person, at the home, in the community, or whatever it is, they're providing services. And then you've got the other, subset of entrepreneurs who are kind of doing service based, whether it be providing professional development, copywriting, doing kind of what you're doing with social media, online type of stuff that's non therapeutic. How does that really shift what someone should be posting on social media? Yeah. So I find there's two different strategies for each setting. So for like the clinics and the brick and mortar going home to children's homes to do therapy and within the homes or even pelvic floor, I've worked with a lot of different therapists, pelvic floor therapists show like that content should be more educational showing what's going on within your clinic and like show, like showcasing your clinic. So when parents see it, they know I want my child going there. I want, I need the service to help with my pulpit for, or whatever your business is. You really want to get that educational information out there. With online businesses, I find that lead magnets or freebies work to grow your email list and then promote email marketing, go into social media groups and give a lot of valuable information, not salesy. People try to stay away from, like, people who are too salesy. So, so there's two different strategies for both businesses. I mean, both types of businesses. I think you're right. And honestly that, actually gives me a little, I guess that makes me feel better about what I'm doing because at the OT Schoolhouse, we're obviously catering more to the OT and OTA population as opposed to like parents or clients. And that's kind of exactly what I do. I, and I'll tell people all the time that I use social media, whether it be LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, I really use those to help lead people to my email list. And then I have a month or a weekly newsletter that goes out that that's where I make 99% of my sales. I don't make sales through Instagram. I don't make sales through LinkedIn. I make sales through my email list. So I think that is spot on. The next question I really wanna ask you is about deciding which platform to start with. I've always been told, don't try to do all of them at once, start with one. But I'd love for you to kind of, what's the next step of that? How do you actually decide which one to start with? It depends. This is a hard question because there's so many different social media platforms out there. And there's people on all of them. So, but LinkedIn is more a business to business for professionals. So if you're like us, like an OT trying to promote to other OTs, that's a good platform to be on. Facebook and Instagram. So Instagram is more of like a creative platform. So if you're going to show your face and do videos and create a post and get that creative side out there, that's the platform to be on. Facebook is more like, it's a great platform to connect with different communities. I like using Facebook for the brick and mortar and like the, the clinics and the location based therapy businesses because, you can really dive deep into the location groups and give a lot of information within those groups. Again, not spamming, not like say, Hey, you come to my clinic like that, but just helping people out and showing that you're an expert in your field. And one thing with Facebook is make sure that you are always using your business page. So you should create a business page. And then if you're going into groups, are you saying that you should actually go into the group as your business page? Yes. Before you weren't able to do this, Facebook now lets you go into groups and post with your page instead of your personal page. Maybe like six months ago, I would say otherwise and use a personal account. But now I would say use your Facebook page because Facebook tracks everybody that you interact with and then you can go on the back end and invite them to like your page if they interacted with you. So that's another way to build your audience with other people's groups by giving value and then inviting them, Hey, come over and see what we're doing. I want to follow-up on that because this is a completely new idea to me as someone who likes to think that I stay in the marketing world a little bit. Have you heard of any downside to that, particularly I'm thinking of the Facebook groups that are moderated? I can imagine that a lot of moderators, their whole life their whole role in what they do is to, like, keep people from advertising. So I I almost feel like I could see a moderator saying, gosh. That guy keeps coming in here as OT Schoolhouse. I know he's in here as Jason, but he's coming in here as OT Schoolhouse and, like, push their buttons. Have you seen any of that yet, or is it still so new that it's not happening yet? Not really. Only because we're not, like, pushing our services. We're not pushing the therapy clinic services or, like, I do engagement for my therapy businesses that work with me too. So I go in as them, a part of their team, and I go in and engage with, people in those groups and it's giving like valuable information. It's not promoting services. It's not saying, Hey, come over here. Like it's just, it's really being authentic and giving your valuable information. And then that's just the whole part about Facebook is connecting with people and all of that. So, so, but you do have to make sure that you stay inside of the rules of those groups because each group does, like, they do have specific rules and you can't promote in some of them, but I'm not saying to promote. I'm saying to go in and engage and have conversations. Yeah. And I think that applies to non OT businesses too. Like, I'm surprised I don't see more of that. Obviously, I'm in my community pages here where I live, and I don't see any businesses doing that. And so I can just imagine the, the extra eyes that you can get on your business just by doing that being helpful. Even if you yeah. Especially if you have a local clinic. Right? Like, if someone posts about their student who's in special education having difficulty with an IEP or something like that, that is, like, the perfect place to jump in and say, Hey, I'm an OT. I've been in hundreds of IEPs. I just want to let you know that you're in the right or, Oh, Hey, this is the district has sixty days to complete the evaluation. Something simple like that just gets their eyes on your page. That's awesome. Exactly. And then if you're doing it from your page, they're, they're seeing your page, not your name, and they, they're more likely to click into your page rather than your user profile. Yeah. Very cool. Well, thank you for that tip. That, that is fantastic. I didn't want to cut you off, or I did cut you off, but I wanted to let you go on if you wanted to talk about any other social media outlets. So I say to really promote on the platform that you like, and that's what I'm doing for me and my businesses because you want to be able to stay consistent and you want to like months on out, if you're promoting, like, if you're making posts for a platform that you don't like, you're not going to stay consistent with it and you're just going to give up. So I cross post a lot of my content to different platforms and optimize it for those platforms. Honestly, I'm not a big LinkedIn person. I know I should be. I cross post everything from my Instagram to LinkedIn, optimize it for LinkedIn and add in those links because I'm not on there much. So if people do like what they're seeing, they can click on the link and get to where I am active. Now you you've used this term a few times today, and and I'm somewhat familiar with it, but it can always learn more optimize. You know, you talked about how you will start with I think Instagram is that primary one that you start with, but you'll optimize a post for LinkedIn or optimize it for Facebook. What does it mean? Let's just pick one. What does it mean to, say you create a social, an Instagram post, and you want to optimize it for Facebook. What does that mean? Kind of even a little bit of that process. What does that look like for you? So I take off all of the hashtags that are going on to Facebook because Facebook, you don't need, hashtags on there. And then depending on the strategy I have for the business, I either put in put in the link for whatever we're we're promoting if we're going to a blog. Mhmm. Or the it depends on the post trailer. But I put in the link or I say comment here to get some engagement going on the post. And now this is just going to your personal page. This isn't going into any of the groups so you can promote on them. And that's really optimizing for Facebook is taking out those hashtags, making sure there's a link. If you want people to go over to the link, Instagram doesn't allow links, so you can't have that. And then making sure the images, I mean, I honestly, I use Instagram images for Facebook. I don't resize and it works. I'm finding that more and more because Facebook has just basically become Instagram for older generation, in my opinion, and allowing links. But, yeah, I mean, everyone's using it on their phone, and I think they they prefer square images when it's on your phone. So I said square images. Are you using square, or are you using slightly larger than square the portrait for Instagram? Because I know Instagram technically will allow you to go a little bit, not full

portrait, not sixteen: 18:17

nine, but, or whatever it is, but do you have a preference or does it matter to you? So I go back and forth. I test them both out. The bigger one get it takes up more screen space, so they say to use the bigger ones, like the Mhmm. Larger sized image for Instagram. However, I'm finding that they both were the same. I mean, as long as you're getting your content out there and that it's valuable for the person looking at it, I don't think it really matters on the size of the image. Great. Thank you. We are getting much more into the weeds than I thought we would today. But I know everyone's going to appreciate that. I wanna go into the next question I have, because this is one that I've heard from a few people who have identified their target market. However, they're not necessarily attracting their target market. I've heard this a lot from OTs who are trying to practitioners that are trying to like target parents or teachers or older clients, but they keep attracting other OT practitioners because they are sharing such great ideas. Do you have any tips for someone who has identified a market but is struggling to actually bring that audience in? First of all, I am so not surprised because OTs love supporting other OTs, and it's great. But I totally understand. But marketing wise that you want it to attract your people. Yeah. Yeah. And so for, yes, for Facebook, again, going into those local communities and engaging, getting out of like the OT groups and going into more where your target audience is. For Instagram, it's a little bit tricky because you can't really target as much. They don't have those groups. So for Instagram, it's more like finding clinics in your area. So like pediatric offices or dental offices where parents may be, and then do some commenting there. And try to get some people on your page through other pages. Absolutely. Great. And I know with Instagram, you can tag locations, but does that make much of a difference? I would always tag location based businesses. I would tag their location because it doesn't hurt. Mhmm. But, I'm, I really don't see much from that. Mhmm. Again, it's more of, testing things out. What I do find that is helpful on Instagram is going into hashtags, like location based hashtags and liking some of those posts within the hashtags. Oh, okay. So maybe just do hashtag your city name or something like that, and go in, like some of those posts that are in there. Maybe it's your community page that's posting a bunch of stuff with that, and like it, and maybe even comment a little bit, and that'll kind of tell the algorithm, Hey, I'm actually invested in this area. Yeah. And you can find a lot of community pages through those hashtags as well, because if they're location based, they're most likely going to use those location hashtags. Good to know. Alright. For when I open a location based business. You mentioned earlier consistency. Consistency has always been tough for me. Full transparency, I did everything well, myself and my my partner at the time did everything for Instagram when we first got started. Then I was doing everything. Then I, like, dropped off the face of the earth on Instagram. Then I got back on. Then I actually use ConciergeBee, which is a a partner with SocialBee, posting platform. I use ConciergeBee to ConciergeBee to help me with creating posts. And it is hard to maintain consistency. It really is. Like, there's just so much. You're trying to run your own business, and then there's Instagram to worry about. What are some tips that you have for I know we can't go into the weeds, like you can't make someone be consistent, but, you know, what general tips might you have? So I plan I have a lot of clients that I work with, so I'm always creating posts. And I, I have consistency down because that's my job. That's what I do. So I create a Trello board and then I put a list of topics down of what I could create. From. So I have like a brainstorming little area where I can pull from topics. So I never have like nothing to pull from. Just to go off a little bit. I did create a sheet where, how to find like the best content for, that people are like searching for, for any business. Okay. Is in Google. So like I go in to Google and find all of those areas and put that in the brainstorming and then create from that brainstorming. And I create the week ahead of time. So a week in advance and three posts per week and schedule it out the week in advance. So I schedule some time during the day and get that all done. And then we're good for the next week. Are you using a particular program to help you with scheduling or are you directly going to Instagram or do you have your own internal platform? For my business, I use a program because I manage so many different accounts Mhmm. That it's just hard to get into Meta and do everything for everybody. But if, like for business owners, I suggest just using the free META platform, going, it's business.facebook.com, going into that backend and there's a planner back there where you can just schedule posts out and you can schedule them out for the whole month if you want. So do a whole bulk crate and schedule them out. Yeah. I gotta give them credit for that. I keep forgetting about it. And every time I log in, I'm like, oh, there's actually a pretty robust scheduling program here. It's it's not bad. And you can also access all of your messages from all your different accounts from Facebook, Instagram, all that. You can really kind of do everything under one meta roof so long as you're using Facebook and Instagram. Obviously, if you're using LinkedIn, you can't necessarily do that under meta. But, yeah, I use SocialBee right now, and I know Hubsuite is one of them. I'm sure there are others. I mean, there are there are many others. Just type in social media schedule or on your app on your phone app, and everything will come up. But, yeah, I I find scheduling posts so helpful because then you can batch them. You can just set aside two hours Monday night, Monday morning, whatever it might be, Tuesday, whatever is your time. Put together some posts, schedule them for the week and just kind of be done with it. And then you're just log in every ten minutes to check to see if you got any new likes. But, you know, that, that's a whole nother problem in itself. Another thing that I really recommend for when creating, is it helps with creating posts faster is making a brand kit on Canva. So you have all of your colors in there, you have your logo in there, so it's easy to make those posts quickly. You want to make sure everything's branded and consistent to your brand because subconsciously people see your colors and see, see that and know it's from you. So just keeping it all consistent and Canva helps with that. Yeah, I love Canva. I love that tool because you can find a, you can find a template that looks pretty and then you just click one button, and it makes all your colors, and it is fantastic. And then you hit the button again, and it uses your colors in a different way. And you're like, Okay, I like that one better. We gotta wrap up here pretty quickly. But I do want to ask you one more question and give you an opportunity to share a little bit more about Social IT. And that last question is, what metrics should someone either look at when they're thinking, hey. I'm going in the right direction with my social, or I'm not going in the right direction? Or maybe maybe not that they're not going in the right direction, but the social media is or is not working for what they want it to work for. Yeah. So metrics, you just want to keep like, look at them with a grain of salt because they're not, like, it. You want to make sure that you are actually, like, it's actually working. And it's like sometimes, like I made a post last week about losing followers and it's totally okay to lose followers because they're not your, they're not your people. If they leave, that's totally fine. But looking at metrics, like post wise, you want to make sure that you are, your reach is going up and you want to have engagement. But take again, take it with a grain of salt because you want to get leads from it. So it depends on the strategy. It's a hard question to answer because you need to know what you're posting for. I completely agree. I I completely agree because, for instance, my post that I put out on Friday, it just says it said sensory is not simple. That's all it said. And I literally have no care for how many likes it gets. I have no care for how many engagements it gets. I don't even go into Instagram to look at those metrics. Instead, I went into my email list management, and I saw that I had 60 plus new sign ups to my email list. Exactly. And that is what the metric that I cared about. Because like I said earlier, my whole plan is to get people from Facebook and social media onto my email list. And that's exactly what that post did. So And that's what social media really is for is to find people. It's not, it doesn't matter really if people are like liking like it. I mean, it does. I mean, it's nice, but as long as people are finding you through social media, then it's working. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing all that. Now I, like I said, I want to give you the opportunity to share a little bit more about social0t.com and what you're doing. And you've shared a little bit about it. But I'm gonna ask you this question, kind of lead you into it. At what point should someone start to say, Hey, you know what? Social media is maybe taking a little bit too much of my time. Social media is hard for me. I don't enjoy it. At what point should they start to reach out to yourself, over at Social LRT to learn more about how you can support them? Honestly, at any point, if you are having any of those feelings, like you hate going on social media, you don't know what to do, you don't know how to create posts, you any of that. We have custom plans so we can help business owners where they're at. But any moment that you feel like social media isn't working for you and you want to be on social media, if that's something that is important to you, then that's when you could come reach out to me. We do full on posting. We create all of the posts. We make sure it's branded, and, and customized to each business owner. And we do engagement. We, I'm starting now starting to do lead magnets. So that's exciting. Yeah. And it's more of the strategy. It's not just posting to post. That's gotta be so difficult. I mean, like I have, I honestly have trouble posting for my own two businesses, and I have so much knowledge in my own two businesses. But to have to learn someone else's business and to really have to understand their business and to do it I mean, OT is so different from pediatrics to adults to all the other areas. But I'm sure you have to take a lot of time out of your day to learn about those different therapy businesses and what makes them very different from the pediatric world that you're used to. So kudos to you for taking that on. It's fun. I'm learning so much. It's it's great. Yeah. Yeah. I I hear from copywriters the same exact thing. It's like you never stop learning because you have a new client, and you've got to learn everything about their business and then everything about their market. And so that's, I'm sure it's a lot of fun. Yeah. I've never would have thought that I would know like the pelvic floor therapists, like inside out. And I do know. It's great. That's awesome. Yeah. Now if you ever decide you wanna go back and work in a clinic, you could go into pelvic floor therapy if you wanted to. You know the information now. But, yeah, I know once you started once you start a business, like, it becomes your thing, and everyone listening to this podcast knows that. Like, everyone's starting a business. And once you have your business, it's your baby. Like, it is your baby. It might be your first child. It might be your second or third child, but it is your baby. And so, Courtney, I I wanna thank you again for coming on, sharing a little bit about social media. Where can anyone listening go to learn more about you and your services? You can find me on Instagram at social social underscore o t. That's where I'm the most active. So send me a message over there and let's talk. Awesome. We will be sure to include a link directly to Courtney's Instagram page, as well as her website. And then also any of the, we we discussed a few apps today, so I'll try and pull those out as well and provide some links to those. So thank you everyone for listening, and thank you, Courtney, for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Here at the OTpreneur podcast, we can't thank you enough for listening in today. If you're looking for a community of OT entrepreneurs, be sure to check out the website at otpreneur.com. At OTpreneur, OT means business. We'll see you next time.