Dr. Alex Van (0:00)

Foreign. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Rocket Chiro Podcast, the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. We're gonna talk about Instagram today and I'm gonna do an overview of an article that I wrote that has a lot of data on it. The article is called the Top Chiropractors on Instagram. What we can learn. I ended up going down a rabbit trail of Instagram and I started looking at who are the top people who have the most followers? What how many likes are they getting on their post per post? How does that. How interactive is their following based on how many likes are getting relative to how many followers they have? I really, really went down the rabbit trail on Instagram because I just sort of got a bee in my bonnet and wanted to answer some questions and then I ended up thinking this information might be useful to other chiropractors. I'm not going to go into all the details because the article is actually very lengthy. I may do a couple podcasts on some observations that I had on the article. If you want to read the whole thing and you want to nerd out on it like I did, you can go to rocketkiro.com IG just the letters IG that will take you directly there and you can read the article for yourself. This podcast is really just going to be an overview of how did I find these chiropractors. Like, what was my criteria? And then just a few observations. Not all of them, but just a few observations. Hopefully this doesn't get too techy and too nerdy for everyone, where your eyes kind of roll back in your head and hopefully the information is interesting. Now, before we get into that, I do want to just say this. If you got started with your practice recently or you're feeling a little bit stuck, check out my Next Step program. It is a place where you can get business and marketing tips for chiropractors that go more in depth than we do on the podcast. And you have access to me and I can help you along the way as you start to build a solid foundation for being a competent small business owner. Great resource for new chiropractors or chiropractors that are feeling a little bit stuck or overwhelmed. The other thing I'll say is if you want a better website or you want to improve your SEO, go to Rocket Chiro. Take my free practice assessment. I'd love to look at your stuff, love to create a new website for you or help you with your SEO if that would be a good fit for you. So Check that out@rocketkyo.com. so what I ended up doing was I've actually had this thought off and on about like, hey, who are the top chiropractors on Instagram? Do I even know who they are? And the answer is no. Like I don't know who they are. And I didn't know off the top of my head. I know some of the chiropractors that are popular and they have big names, but there were just people. I was like, ah, I'm not even aware of, of who they are. I don't really nerd out on chiropractic treatment videos and chiropractor accounts and things of that nature, even though I work with chiropractors all the time. And so I decided to just go on Google and do a search for like, hey, who are the top chiropractors on Instagram? Sort of struck out there, didn't really get a lot of information, ended up going to chat GPT. I thought maybe AI knows, you know, it's like. And ChatGPT basically told me to go to Instagram and do the work. My. I didn't really need AI to start bossing me around. But yeah, so basically that's what I was told by Chat GPT and that's ultimately what I ended up doing. So how did I find these chiropractors? So I ended up with 23 people on my list. I am not claiming at all that these are the, these are all of the top 23 chiropractors on Instagram because Instagram just isn't a place where you can easily search information and kind of sort through data. It just isn't that the way the search functions work and stuff. It's just not very user friendly for that sort of thing. There might be other services out there that make it easier to do. I'm unaware of those things. Didn't want to put the time and effort or money into solving that particular problem. So I just did the best that I could with some basic searching on Instagram. Now there were also a couple accounts that got bumped off of my list because chiropractors that weren't primarily being chiropractors online. And I don't mean that I'm like judging how you're practicing. I just mean that if you're doing life advice or modeling or you know, influencing that sort of thing, I. That's not what I was looking for. So those, even though they might be popular and they might be a chiropractor, I bumped those off the list. Also chiropractors, where if they had their privacy settings set up to where I couldn't see their post likes, like how many likes they had recently. I bumped them off the list as well. Because one of the things I did on this article is I did a deep dive into the 10 most recent posts, how many likes they had, what's the interaction, and if I can't see your stats, I can't fill out that information. And so that got you bumped off my list as well. So 23 names. I will say one of them is a physical therapist. That's because I thought what he was doing is very much in line with what chiropractors can or could do on Instagram. And I thought he had almost 100,000 followers. Why not include him? So I threw in a physical therapist as well. Of the 23 chiropractors, the average number of followers was 174,000 followers. The range went from like, hold on, let me look here real quick. I have it in front of me. The range went from 27,000 to 887,000, which honestly blew my mind. Like, I was just sort of shocked that a chiropractor doing chiropractic had that many followers. Maybe there is somebody that has more than that, but even that number blew my mind. I will say that those were outliers. And I have the list here. Let me look at it real quick. And I'm not going to say if you want to see who these people are. Exactly. They're all in the article. Rocketcaro.com IG Here we go. So the top person with 887 is O, C, C or OC Chiropractor. It's orange county chiropractor Alex Van something or other. Don't know who that is. And so there was one with 887, there was one with 613, 613,000, one with 321. And they start really dropping off. And actually the 613 and 887,000 are the two that really stand out in terms of volume. So there are some potential mistakes with the data. So if you're going to nerd out on the data like I nerded out on the data, I just, I do want to acknowledge, and I did this in the article, just acknowledge potential flaws in the data I did not analyze when it comes to interaction. I looked at likes and you don't have to be a follower of someone to like a post. So to say this many likes and this many followers. And that's how I'm going to come up with an interaction per percentage, like a how active your community is. It's going to be a rough number because there could be people that are not followers who do like a particular post. So it throws the numbers off. The other thing is that interaction could be measured in shares and comments and I didn't look at those either. So we were just. I'm just getting a rough idea of how interactive are these communities. The other number that I thought was interesting is I also broke it down into how many followers does someone have per like, which I thought was really interesting. And it's just sort of a different way of looking at interaction. And the lowest number that I had, let's see, followers per like I think the lowest number was 71 and it was a female chiropractor, which is cool. Good for her. I think that was the lowest number. And I'm not going to nerd out on this, all this stuff on audio and on the podcast because this gets, you know, hairy. So I broke the content down into seven categories because I also documented what type of content that chiropractors are putting out. And I put the seven categories were this treatment, education, shock, inspiration, celebrity promotion and humor. Those were the seven categories. And basically when I looked over the 10 most recent posts for all of these chiropractors, I made a note of what type of content of those 10 posts. What are they putting out there? Most of these are self explanatory. The treatment, the education. I will explain what shock is and what I consider shock is whether a chiropractor intentionally or unintentionally, there is a shock value element that has nothing to do with what the chiropractor is actually like the chiropractor being a chiropractor. Now this could be a really aggressive adjustment. This could be the way the patient reacts, it could be the way a patient's dressed. Where in some chiropractors it was very obvious that they were intentionally videoing in such a way to, to like you. You'd see more revealing angle or the person was wearing like really, really tight clothes or something. I would consider all of that shock. I would also consider I saw a chiropractor who had a lot of tattoos, tattoos on his neck and all kinds of stuff. And I don't think he was intentionally being shocking. Like I don't think that that was like, oh, he got all those tattoos just to get more clicks on Instagram. Like I don't believe that at all. But I do believe that the the amount of tattoos that he had and the fact that he was neck tattoos and head tattoos and all kinds of stuff. I do think that there is a, a shock or an intrigue element to that. So that fell into that category as well. So just kind of clarifying what that was. Now some of the things that I actually thought were surprising to me. Number one, the thing that I'll point out, and this isn't surprising, but it just sort of validates something I already thought is that treatment videos are by far the most popular of all the top chiropractors. 20 out of the 23 had treatment videos. They were the most common. It was really unusual. In fact, the physical therapist was one of the people that didn't have treatment videos, which sort of makes sense with, with what they're doing, how that's a little bit different than what chiropractors are doing. The other two, there was two other ones that didn't have treatment videos, but it was unusual to see one of those top chiropractors that didn't wasn't doing treatment videos of some sort. That to me indicates that if you want to make progress on Instagram, I think the easiest low hanging fruit way to do it is start posting treatment videos. I had sent this over to, to Strat Polson, who I've had on the podcast before, had him look at it, gave me some suggestions or thoughts about what it, what I saw. And he, he, he had said that to me before. He was like, hey, listen, the treatment videos, that's like the way to go. And as I looked through all of this, it just confirmed what he had already told me. The things that were a little bit surprising to me is I see a lot of dumb chiropractor videos online. Dumb chiropractor videos online, where chiropractors are trying to be funny, they're trying to be clever. And I will say this, being someone who's, I'm not saying I'm funny on the podcast because I don't, I don't necessarily think that I'm funny on the podcast. I'm not trying to be funny, but in my real life I'm pretty funny guy. I, I'm pretty good at making people laugh. I do a decent job of quick wit type type stuff. I like telling stories, I like making people laugh. And I have a really, really, really, really, really strong conviction about the fact that you're either funny or you're not. And when you're not funny and you try to be funny, it's very, very cringy. I think it probably falls in a line of being like creative and clever. Also like it, the, the whole thing online. Everybody wants to be a certain way and not everybody can be. And I'm. Listen, I'm not popular on social media. Like, I'm just not. So I'm not telling you that I have the personality to be popular in social media and you don't. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I see a lot of dumb chiropractors doing dumb things for attention. And I thought I would see a lot of that within the top chiropractors that I was looking at and I really didn't. There were a few chiropractors that were doing, posted some things that were kind of humor related or they were trying to be funny or they were doing like a cute video. I only saw one chiropractor where the top post that they had posted had something to do with sort of a viral cute video of the ones that I looked at. And this particular chiropractor was really on the low end of all the chiropractors that I was, that I was looking at. Now I'm not saying that he shouldn't do it or she shouldn't do it or whatever. Like, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that I was expecting to see more silly videos because I see them so much with just the generic kind of low level Instagram chiropractor that I normally see. I thought that was going to be pervasive and it just isn't. And so I don't think humor probably moves the needle quite as much as what maybe some people think it's going to the other thing. And this is sort of the same thing that I would say about the shock category as well, which is why I defined that before. I've also seen chiropractors where there's that shock element. They're, you know, people are dressed a certain way and they're, they're sort of trying to fall into that like sex sales category where they're getting attention or whatever because someone's dressed a certain way. And I'm not telling you that you can't have pretty people on your video. And I'm not telling you you can't have attractive people as patients and you can't post videos online. They will, they'll get attention then they'll probably get more attention than an ugly person. I mean, that's just sort of human nature, what I am saying and what I did notice is that although the videos that are overtly sexual do seem to get more attention, it doesn't seem to be good attention. And there was an article and I linked to it. I put some quotes that were in the. I put some quotes in the article and then actually linked to this article and it's called does sex still Sell? What Marketers should know. And it just talks about the fact that sex gets attention, but it doesn't sell outside of certain industries. And the healthcare industry would not be one of those industries and industries like makeup, alcohol, impulse buying stuff. Those. There's certain things that have to do with like image that are probably going to be more likely to have like sex cells and anything related to sex, like those sort of things would. You know where sex really does sell? And in our case, as healthcare providers, all you're doing. Does it get attention? Yes. Does it make people remember that they saw it? Yes. But what they've noticed is that people don't really remember what the particular advertisement was about or what the particular account was about. They just remember the sexual part of it. So it's. It's very counterproductive if you're actually trying to grow your practice as a chiropractor, I guess if you're just trying to get attention for the sake of attention. But I was expecting actually to see more of that. And I didn't really see as much of it as I thought I was going to. There was some. And some of it was bad. Like, some of it was like, kind of like, oh, okay, like I get it. Like I see what you're doing here. But honestly, I was expecting more. And I think that's good. Like high five to us as chiropractors that, you know, turns out we don't have to be sleaze balls. Who would have thought? Last thing I want to note is this, and then I'll wrap this episode up, is I did. There was a certain part of me that believes, and I sort of even alluded to this already. I was talking about, like, some people have the personality and some people don't. The nice thing about what I saw when I was looking at these different chiropractors, the nice thing about what I saw is that I saw different types of personalities. It wasn't this dominant, like boisterous, you know, outgoing kind of whatever that. Whatever that personality is that. And maybe it's my own wrong way of thinking about it, but there was a certain way that I was thinking about, like people that are popular online are this particular way so chiropractors who are popular online, they're this particular way and what I noticed was a variety of different personalities, a variety of ways of communicating sort of the same ideas or even, even within the context of those, those different types of, of content people were doing them different ways. And I was really encouraged by that because what I, what I noticed from a treatment standpoint is some people talked a little bit more, they talked a little bit more, they had a little more interaction with the patient, maybe they were doing some education on the video as they're working on and they're sort of doing stuff like that. And then there were other chiropractors that were on this list that they, they, it was pretty quiet, like they're just doing their treatment and they're just good at what they do and they're, they're working with their hands and, and that's the point of the video. And so it's sort of a two sided thing that I noticed is one is that I was just glad to see that you don't have to be a certain personality type to have a big following on Instagram because that's a difficult thing to change. Like I said, if, if you have to be funny to have a big following on Instagram, that's rough because not everybody's funny and I don't know that you can change that. I've not seen anybody do a good job of that and so that's bad. But it's good to note that like, hey, there are funny people and not funny people. There are serious people and not serious people. There are people with really clever, you know, like fun personalities and very likable right out of the gate. And there are those people that are maybe, maybe a little more niche and when it's like that, that's maybe they, they're not as kind of obviously likable or whatever. You have to give them a second, like whatever that is. I just noticed that there was a lot of diversity and I think that that's a good thing. And to me that's very encouraging. The one thing that I would say is this, if you don't have, if you, if you're going to talk more and I am guilty of talking too much. So I understand that. I know I get told all the time by the people I love the most that I talk too much. But if you're going to be someone that talks a lot online on your video, you need to have the personality that can hold someone's attention and make that where it does. Isn't a detriment to your content if you're more quiet or if you don't really have that personality or if you're not really don't come across quite as well on video or whatever. I think that's fine. I would just lean into talking less and demonstrating more. And the fact that I saw both of those things being done was encouraging to me. So that was the other thing that just sort of caught me off guard is I just was expecting to see. I was expecting to see people trying to be funny more and that being the popular thing. I was expecting shock value and that being the popular thing. And. And I was also expecting a certain personality and kind of having this uniformity with personality and like, now that's the popular thing. And unfortunately, if you don't fall into these particular categories, you're kind of hosed. And that's not what I saw. And I think that that's good and that should be encouraging for those of you who are wanting to grow your following on Instagram. So if you want more information about this particular article, like I said, I'm. I'm probably going to do some more podcasts about this. I may not. I'm sort of worn out in this, honestly. Like, I've been looking at this for a while and I may or may not talk about it more. But if you want to actually check out the article, go to RocketKiro.com IG that'll take you right there and you can nerd out on all the stats as much as you want. All right, guys, that's it. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Thank you for listening to the podcast, thank you for subscribing, thank you for sharing and all the cool things that you do. If you want help growing your practice, go to RocketKiro.com if you want a better website, go to Rocket Kyro and request a practice assessment. I'll be happy to help you however I can. I'm done. I'm out of here. I will talk to you later. See you.