Instagram Post Guidelines for Growing your Allied Health Practice as a Solo Practitioner

How to Grow a Solo Health Practice Using Instagram Posts

Instagram is an excellent free marketing tool for solo practitioners to build a trustworthy online footprint, attract clients and grow their business.

For many solo practitioners though, navigating the world of social media can be tricky and even overwhelming. You might often be wondering what to post, how often to post it, and what to include in a post to yield the best results—not to mention finding the time to put it all together!

If looking for some direction on how to gain real results from your Instagram efforts, I’ve put together a few simple guidelines any health practitioner can follow to grow Instagram reach and become more discoverable to clients looking for your service.

Let’s dive in!

Instagram Post Guidelines

A bit like Google, Instagram its own kind of social media search engine.

When it comes to your discoverability (also known as reach) on Instagram, the algorithm uses key words from your images and content to decide if your page is relevant to show audience members searching your service.

To make sure you’re showing up, I’d suggest a basic Instagram Post Checklist you can mentally run through before hitting Publish:

Instagram Post Checklist for Health Professionals

1. Include relevant keywords and a next step in your post caption

Every post you make on Instagram should serve a purpose. For solo practitioners, that’s usually to promote your services or showcase your expertise.

Relevant keywords in the body of your caption might include your role/position, services you offer, your availability and location—the essential questions any viewer needs answered before they book an appointment.

To write captions that convert, always include:

• Who you are — eg. I’m a psychologist
• What you do — eg. I offer telehealth counselling services Australia-wide

It’s important to sound like yourself when writing a caption, but whether you push the character limit or prefer a minimum word count, viewers should understand these basic things—and importantly, they’re a natural way to include relevant keywords that boost your Instagram discoverability.

2. Include a call-to-action signoff

Finishing your caption with clear next step (or call-to-action) is essential to remove doubt and direct viewers on the path to becoming clients.

People might be interested in your service, but they’ll move on if they don’t know what to do next. As solo practitioners, it’s our job to make it as easy as possible for viewers to book our services, and the biggest part of that is telling them how! 

Calls-to-action can be kept simple or lead with a question/transformation, but should clearly explain the next step to working with you. Depending on your style or limitations, this could sound like:

• Simple — to book an appointment, visit my website.
• Targeted/transformative — ready to build motivation as a skill and finally start following through? Book a coaching session on my website.

3. Add a location to your post

Location keywords have their place in your post caption most of the time, but there’s another way to add your general location to become more discoverable to local audiences.

In the post settings after the caption, select the ‘Add location’ tab and enter a suburb, city, or even a region or state—this adds a little extra signal for the Instagram algorithm to help strengthen your local relevance.

Easy Ways to Maximise Results from your Instagram Posts

Once you’ve worked in the basic discoverability markers for your Instagram posts and finally hit Share, there are a few easy ways to encourage more views and engagement from your hard work.

Quick Tips for Improving your Instagram Post Results

1. Post consistently

‘Consistency’ doesn’t have to mean daily or even three times per week, but it is important for growing your allied health practice on Instagram.

As a solo practitioner, it’s important to be realistic about the time and energy you can afford to social media, but a simple posting routine of once per week or even once per fortnight helps keep your profile moving and reminds your existing audience that you’re still available when they need you.

2. Keep content relevant

Your opportunity to make an impression on a viewer’s timeline is fleeting, and they’re more likely to engage when post content is relevant to their needs and interests.

If you love sharing holiday greetings or inspirational quotes, these make for great garnishes to a main course—so should be used sparingly, not as the bulk of your content.

If your inspirational quote carries a meaningful backstory, share it—and also share how it applies to your audience, or your own personal experience. If the holiday or event is relevant to your service, outline ways viewers can participate or raise awareness, and why it matters. 

Feeling stumped for post ideas shouldn’t end with you wishing your Instagram audience a Happy St Patrick’s day. If you’re pressed for time, something as simple as next week’s appointment availability, a friendly headshot, a quick description of a service you offer or even a reminder of your opening hours can get you over the line while keeping content relevant to your business and audience.

3. Share posts to your Instagram story

In a digital environment as noisy as Instagram, posts alone are limited in their capacity to reach viewers—only a small percentage of your followers will be in the right place at the right time to see your post on their timeline.

Sharing a post to your Instagram story is a quick and easy way to increase reach among your existing audience by broadcasting a new addition to your page (which is why it’s good to keep things relevant). 

Asking friends, family or colleagues to share your posts or even sharing them via your own personal account is another great way to expand viewership and promote your practice.

4. (Bonus tip) Add a comment call-to-action to your post caption

You might not know these by name, but when you see accounts signing off a caption with ‘What do you think of X? Let me know in the comments!‘ or something similar, this is a comment call-to-action.

Comment CTAs don’t really belong in your basic post guidelines, but they can be a great way to encourage engagement from viewers by starting conversations in the comments of your post. In turn, this signals to Instagram that your post is worth talking about, and prompts the algorithm to share it more widely among viewers.

5. Reply to comments

The more comments on your post, the better. Don’t spam your own comments section, but do reply to viewers who take the time to engage with your content—this helps make them feel valued, build community by starting conversations and can often answer questions that others might also be wondering.

A reply as simple as a ‘thankyou’ can go a long way, and as for the trolls—well, I like to kill ‘em with kindness: ‘Sorry to hear you feel that way! Feel free to reach out via DM if you’d like to chat further’ (then block them) but even negativity online can have a positive outcome.

Engagement is engagement to the algorithm, and a polite response makes you look mature to the rest of your audience while making trolls look a bit silly (because they are). When all is said and done, you’re an expert at your craft—don’t give any weight to the opinions of silly people.

What to Do if your Allied Health Practice Still Gets Low Reach and Engagement on Instagram

If you’re already doing these things but find your views and engagement are still low and you’re not getting traffic to your website, there might be more to the problem than appearances suggest.

Brand Positioning and How it Affects Instagram Growth for Health Practices

Market positioning (or brand positioning) is an important strategy for succeeding with your social media efforts.

In short, these are marketing guidelines designed to attract right-fit leads through your marketing channels (like your social media and online presence), because these specific people are the most likely to engage and quickest to become clients. The change from a viewer to a client is known as a conversion, and the idea is that brand positioning increases conversion rates to grow your practice and revenue.

Brand positioning is something I call an invisible system. Most health practitioners have never heard of it, but it provides clarity, direction and strength to your marketing efforts, and directly affects more visible marketing aspects of your practice like effectiveness of your website, social media and ads.

If you apply the suggestions in this article and still find your Instagram views, engagement and referring website traffic is low, especially when running boosted content or paid ads, there’s a strong likelihood you’re speaking to the wrong people—which is detrimental to your time, energy and bottom line.

Final Thoughts

Many solo health practitioners experience the same difficulties on Instagram without knowing what they are or how to fix them, but a quick self-assessment can help you understand if brand positioning is the true cause for slow (or no) Instagram growth.

It’s something I cover in my clarity workshop The Waiting Room, a 60-minute online session that includes more information about brand positioning and the other invisible systems in your practice, and how they affect your time, energy, practice growth and revenue.

The Waiting Room is available online 24/7 as a first step to growing your allied health practice steadily and sustainably. Perhaps I’ll see you there!

—Emily