Boost Your Veterinary Practice Using Facebook (Part 1)

Author: Alison Burden-Blake
Posted: Friday 3rd February, 2012. 17:50:35

In the last three articles I spoke about what you need to do to prepare your practice and yourself in order to dive into social media.

So by now you’ve sorted out your website and have decided that you will be anything but boring! Excellent!

So what now? Well as a veterinary practice your best place to start with social media is on Facebook. Largely because many of you will be comfortable with using Facebook already, and more importantly because many of your clientele will be there already. Also Facebook gives you plenty of opportunity to have a great visual impact (woah, let me try that in plain engllish!) You get to put up great photos and brand images, and get your clients to join in too.

To have a commercial presence on Facebook you need to have a business Page. There are many people everyday who lose all their hardwork on building a following on Facebook, because they are using a personal profile under the name of their business. This is against Facebook terms and conditions and the lovely folks at Facebook are entitled to remove your profile if you do this. Not good!

So you will need to start up a Facebook Page for your practice. To do this you need to scroll to the very bottom of your Home page and click on Create a Page. Simples!




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You’ll then arrive at this page:




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I recommend that you choose Local Business or place. There are a number of reasons for this, including the ability for your clients to ‘Check-in’ at your clinic when they visit and the fact that new ‘Likers’ of your page will be asked if they’d like to write you a recommendation by Facebook.

You’ll then be asked to put in your practice’s name, address and telephone number and agree to the terms and conditions (which I recommend you read!)

After that you’re asked if you’d like to upload a photo – to start with this should be a recognisable picture like your logo (we’ll get more technical on this in a later article).

Then you land here:




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There are various streams of thought on how to proceed here. Of course if you’re new to Facebook and you’ve only just registered yourself then you’re unlikely to have any friends (!). My personal recommendation here is to hold fire before doing the first 3 things offered here. There’s not a huge amount of point in asking friends, relatives and contacts to Like your brand spanking new Page – rather wait ‘til you’ve got some content up to show them.

Therefore you should leave only ‘Like this page’ ticked before hitting continue.

Next up you’re asked for your URL (web address) and a description. The description that you add here will show up on the left hand side of your Page. So (deep breath) in the interests of Not Being Boring – make it interesting, at least the first sentence anyway!

Once all that info is in you have a Facebook Page! Woohoo! That wasn’t too difficult was it? Next time – I have a Facebook Page for my veterinary practice – now what the heck do I put on it?!

Till next time…

We get it. You're busy being a vet. You know that using social media can enhance your practice, but finding time is difficult. We're the UK's only social media specialists for vets, so let us sort it. We're passionate about what you do and big on personal service.

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