Is Social Media Marketing Worth it For Therapists?

Written By Lindsay Bryan-Podvin
 

Social Media Marketing For Therapists

Updated March 2024

Social media isn't going anywhere. Social media marketing for therapists can be an additional way to reach more people and potentially fill your private practice. When deciding on social media marketing, it's vital to make sure you can answer the questions "Who do I help?" and "What outcomes can a person who works with me have?" Answers to those two questions can help guide your marketing efforts on different social media platforms. And when it comes to choosing a platform to create content for? Start off by asking yourself, “where are my clients? Are they asking their Facebook friends for tips? Are they connecting with new people on LinkedIn? Are they searching for affirmations on Instagram and TikTok?”

If you decide to give social media marketing a try for your private practice, I recommend choosing one platform and sticking with it for 3-6 months before you abandon it. Having 3-6 months of data can help guide your decision on if the platform is right for your practice. 

Social Media and Counseling Ethics

The world of social media and therapy has changed rapidly in the past 15 years. When I was in graduate school in 2010, we were taught not to have any public social media profiles. Today, you can't pick up your phone without seeking someone claiming to be a therapist talk about trauma responses, stimming behaviors, or masking. Like it or not, therapists and other mental health professionals aren't leaving social media.

Some Instagram Therapists have recently come under fire, even being called out as damaging and cult-like (yikes!) To avoid falling into any ethical grey areas, make sure you have a few things in place on your social media profiles. For example, on your main bio or profile, make sure you have some disclaimers around who follows you, that following/liking/engaging with your profile or content doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship, and that following/liking/engaging may limit current and past client confidentiality, and that social media is not therapy. Linking to urgent or emergent mental health services is also a good idea.   

What Social Media Should I Use For My Therapy Business?

When answering the question, "what social media should I use for my therapy business?" In classic therapy, speak, "it depends!" Any social media platform can work. BUT therapists who are marketing their practices do not have to be on every platform. I deleted Facebook in February of 2021 which made no negative impact on my business. I also took two-month-long Instagram sabbaticals in 2021 and plan to do it again in 2022. 

My advice? If you decide to use social media for marketing your practice, choose the platform you enjoy the most. For example, if you are scrolling on TikTok in-between client sessions, give TikTok a try! Find yourself tapping through Instagram stories? Try posting there. 

You can also check out the chart below to see where your ideal clients are hanging out. If you are a therapist who helps teens with self-esteem, Tik Tok could be an excellent social media platform to try. Alternatively, if you work with perfectionistic professionals, LinkedIn could be a good match for marketing your practice. 

My general rule is to stick with one platform for three months before making changes or adding another marketing channel. For example, once you get comfortable posting on Instagram 2-3x per week, after doing it for three months, if you like it and have the energetic capacity, repurpose your Instagram Reels to TikTok.

Disadvantages of Marketing on Social Media

Marketing on social media isn't all fun and games. The disadvantages include algorithm changes, high cost of ads, poor organic reach, and quick-moving trends. These disadvantages can mean that a marketing method that worked great for your private practice for a while suddenly stops working. Or organic reach used to be fantastic, but a platform starts heavily promoting paid ads and promotions, and your content is no longer showing up on others' feeds. 

Another disadvantage? Getting hacked. I know countless therapists who built their followings (and businesses) on social media only to have their accounts hacked or duped by imposters. When this happens, the platforms mostly shrug it off and the content creator loses all of their content and their audience.

Finally, another disadvantage is the mental health aspect of creating and consuming content as a therapist on social media. We all know that social media consumption and use correlate with poor mental health outside of the business downsides of social media marketing. As a result, everything from anxiety to poor sleep has been linked to social media usage.

Social Media-Adjacent Marketing Ideas

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO), YouTube, email marketing, and Pinterest are social media-adjacent in my mind. YouTube and Pinterest act more like search engines, and so the content tends to live on longer; 20 days and four months, respectively. With SEO, however, an SEO-optimized blog post or podcast episode can live for two years.

When it comes to marketing a private practice, I'm all about content longevity. So I put the bulk of my marketing efforts into podcasts and blog posts. With the help of a strategic assistant, podcasts and posts are broken up (or "repurposed") into things like Pinterest Pins and Instagram posts. 

I also send regular emails to my email list about my blog posts, podcast content, and other money and psychology-related content I think members of my email newsletter might enjoy. Why email, you might be asking therapist friend? Isn’t email where spam goes to die? Not really. According to OptInMonster, the first thing most people check on their phone in the morning is their email. Not social media, not the news, their email. Cultivating a relationship with potential clients via email is a great option if that feels good for you. Now, email marketing for therapists is definitely different than social media marketing, which is why I said it’s “social media adjacent.” 

Is Social Media Marketing Worth It?

Social media marketing can be a great adjunct to your current marketing efforts. Alternatively, if you aren't a fan of social media and the idea of social media marketing is stressing you out, I give you full permission to pass on it.

When I look at my analytics (that’s a fancy way of saying “data”) it paints a really clear picture: people find me by way of google (thanks to SEO), “vet” me on social media, and work with me after being on my email list.

Personally? I love having my podcast and blog be the main ways of marketing my private therapy practice and coaching, and repurposing those pieces of content into smaller, bite-sized tidbits of content for platforms like Instagram. I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I don't market my practice there. 

"Worth it" depends. There are pros and cons of social media marketing for therapists. If you decide to use social media to amplify your message, make sure you have good boundaries and disclaimers on your platforms. And have fun! If it's stressing you out, consuming too much of your time, or not providing enough results, you don't have to keep using it. 

Help With Marketing For Therapists 

Marketing is the process of being seen. When we reframe it that way, it makes it so much more approachable for social justice-oriented therapists. If you want a more in-depth look at how to market your private practice sustainably, I have a mini-course on exactly that! In addition to that, I’ve got other courses just for private practice therapists that you can grab here:

 
Lindsay Bryan-Podvin
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