Why Counselors Need A Facebook Business Page

I spent an hour trying to find a counselor for animal assisted therapy. I found a handful of

interesting candidates. Every single one of them had a Facebook presence. Half of them had a

business page. Absolutely none of them had any contact information in sight when I clicked on

their business page or their website to which their business page directed me. Being the

persistent person that I am, I put on my detective cap and committed each of their names to

short term memory then Google searched each one. I found one name. After all that searching I

was able to contact one person. I am sure every single one of those counselors was more than

qualified to treat the ailment for which I wanted to hire him or her, however, they were not

available to me.

I cannot stress these three things enough:

1)     You need to put yourself out there.

2)     You need a Facebook Business Page (Especially if you want to run Facebook Ads, which helps put yourself out there)

3)     You need to make sure your contact information is stupid-easy to find.

Putting yourself out there

I get it. We are not really taught how to market ourselves in graduate school. Doing it might push us outside our comfort zone. I know it does me. I am the type of person who likes to sit at the very back of the class and I blush when the teacher calls on me. Yes, to this day, as an adult, I blush. I hate putting myself “out there”. Luckily, for me and you, marketing is a skill that can be learned, practiced, and polished. I would probably still blush in a classroom setting, but I have found my way of marketing that works with my personality.

If people can’t find you, they are not going to call you, book with you, or come to session with you. If you want clients, you must market yourself. That means putting yourself where the stressed-out people are. There is evidence to show that stressed out people are on Facebook. People on Facebook are getting more stressed out and they use Facebook as a way to cope with the stress (Tandoc & Goh, 2023). Help them break the cycle. By putting yourself on their news feed you are doing them a favor. Seriously.

You Need a Facebook Business Page

You are going to need a platform from which to create ads. The best place to run ads for your business from is a Facebook Business Page.

This is also the most ethical option. By keeping your personal and professional Facebook presences separate, you’re more likely to avoid dual relationships. You don’t want potential clients “friending” you. That could get messy and awkward. 

In a perfect world, this Facebook Business page will be a beautiful, invisible, traffic manager directing ads towards the public and directing the public towards your website. You want people to see your ad, click on the link that goes to your website and schedule a session with you. The End.

You’ll still want your Business Page to be beautiful and align with your brand, but you don’t need to spend hours up keeping it. Instead just set it up (Which I walk you thought here). Post a couple of posts (Which I walk you through here). And let it be.

You don’t really want people interacting on your page anyway. To deter activity (and to cover your ethical basis) you’ll need state in a pinned post that “Likes, comments, follows, messages,” and basically any interaction on social media, “are not HIPPA compliant.” You don’t want people leaving a life-story comment on your marketing material for all to see. To deter and manage this, I also let people know that if I see such comments I will be deleting them for the sake of their privacy. To this day, I’ve not had to delete a comment.

Stupid-Easy Contact

They shouldn’t interact on my page? What!? Don't worry. This is why you want your contact information stupid-easy to find. You want clients to call you, email you, or better yet, go to your website and request an appointment. These are the best ways to set up a counseling appointment. Let them know this. In words. In a pinned post. In bold letters. By making it the only way to contact you. And, yes, you guessed it, make it easy for them to find your phone number, email, and website link.

 

How do you get these three elements to work in harmony to start filling your schedule quickly? Let's get started with Creating a Facebook Business Page for Counselors.

References

Tandoc Jr, E.C., & Goh, Z. H., (2023). Is facebooking really depressing? Revisiting the relationships among social media use, envy, and depression. Information, Communication & Society, 26:3, 551-567, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1954975