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With over 12,000 followers since first launching her @GlamOptometrist Instagram account at the beginning of 2016, Dr. Fartash has set the standard for what it means to be a social media success in optometry. She’s reaching eyewear and ocular enthusiasts around the globe with her posts about glasses fashion and ocular health and beauty advice. And people are engaging on the topics we as optometrists care about – when she posted advice about disposing mascara every 3 months, she had over 300 post likes and 37 comments. How has she gotten the average Instagram user interested in eyes? Dr. Fartash talks social media and the future of patient-doctor interactions in today’s podcast, and breaks down her success strategies for making social media work for your practice.
Getting started? You need to build followers. Dr. Fartash recommends
- Comment on other accounts to start interactions. It’s like introducing yourself; start a conversation with accounts with similar interests and they will likely follow and comment back.
- Know your audience: wanting more than just other OD followers? Give the average person what they are looking for. They typically starts with fashion and eyewear posts, and you can sprinkle in ocular health posts as you build your brand.
- Visuals: social media (and especially Instagram) is an entirely visual medium. Make sure your posts are quality images – clear, bright, and something that you think people would stop scrolling to look at.
- Hashtags: your hashtags alert potential followers of the common interests they share with you. Tagging “glasses” is a great place to start, but there will be a lot of competition on a glasses tag to get traffic. To make your #glasses tag count, comment on others that are tagging glasses in their post in the hopes they will follow back to your page.
- How often to post? Dr. Fartash posts 2-3 times a day (morning, around lunch, and evening) to grow her account.
- Share other’s content, but always link back to the original source. Dr. Fartash posts about 50% original content and 50% shares from other accounts. Sharing posts and images from others builds the community of Instagrammers she is a part of – by sharing posts from an account she likes it increases the likelihood that account will follower her back or share her account with their followers. It’s a great way to grow your account!
