As you already know, social media platforms like Facebook, Yelp and Google+ can be incredibly powerful marketing tools for your veterinary hospital. Not only do they give you an opportunity to communicate directly with your current clients and potential new clients, they also allow people to share genuine recommendations with their local communities. Now, we can add Nextdoor to that list of useful platforms.
Nextdoor is a social media site organized by neighborhood, and it focuses on community communication. A user must verify they live at the address they provide in order to use Nextdoor and gain access to their neighborhood group. Conversations in these groups tend to focus on local goings-on and recommendations for nearby businesses and services. Now, Nextdoor is allowing businesses to create pages and have a part in these discussions, too.
This is huge for veterinary hospitals, as people tend to trust recommendations from people who live near them. Whether or not you have a page for your hospital on Nextdoor, there’s a good chance people will be talking about you: Veterinary hospitals are regularly in the top five categories of recommended businesses, along with dentists and restaurants. Within each category, businesses are ranked by how many people in their neighborhood recommended them. Lots of recommendations on Nextdoor can give a veterinary hospital a lot of visibility.
This can happen even if you haven’t claimed your business’s page. If you do have a page, however, you can respond to comments left by users in your neighborhood and nearby neighborhoods about your hospital.
“This is just like what Angie’s List wants to be, only Nextdoor is free,” says Justin Vandeberghe, managing director of marketing at iVET360, a company that provides practice management services, like marketing, to veterinary hospitals across the United States.
iVET360 is encouraging all of their clients to claim their Nextdoor pages now that they can. Nextdoor business page setup and management will now be part of iVET360’s standard marketing services, which are included in all their service levels.
“It’s super exciting that a verified community is allowing businesses to accept recommendations and criticisms, ultimately helping their practice operations,” says Vandeberghe. “You’re gaining access to something that was previously behind closed doors. Now, there’s visibility. You can see what your community is saying about you. Whether the comments are good or bad, seeing this feedback and responding to it can only make you better.”
Nextdoor also encourages businesses to share their pages via other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, to ask for even more recommendations from their trusted clients. iVET360’s marketing managers work with their hospitals to get more Nextdoor recommendations through other means as well, like in-hospital signage and reputation management tools and outreach.
iVET360 provides comprehensive marketing, staff development and data analytics solutions for independently owned, primary care veterinary hospitals across the nation. For more information about iVET360’s services or to register for their free monthly webinar, please visit their website at iVET360.com.