Quick answer
HM’s social media marketing is daily cross-platform content plus managed community response, governed by two named rules. Community Management is the part of that work this page covers, and it sits in the Authority pillar because it takes the longest to build and compounds the hardest, so it starts in week one.
Key takeaways
- It needs the 3,000 people within twenty minutes of the office who might need a skin check, and it needs to look active and answerable to the person who found the practice on Google and is checking Instagram before calling.
- The false belief they arrive with, and there are two.
- “Who is answering the comments?” HM is, within 2 to 4 hours during business hours, on an approved response framework with a documented escalation path.
- Community Management sits in the Authority pillar, and it takes the longest to build and compounds the hardest, so it starts in week one.
- HM does not answer clinical questions in comments or direct messages.
01 — OverviewWhat Community Management is, and what it is not
It needs the 3,000 people within twenty minutes of the office who might need a skin check, and it needs to look active and answerable to the person who found the practice on Google and is checking Instagram before calling. It is not organic reach as a growth channel. Organic social does not fill a schedule on its own and HM says so out loud. What it does is close the trust distance for someone already considering the practice, and hold the ground the practice’s name occupies on platforms it does not control. It is not stock imagery of anonymous people in white coats. Practice Culture at 25% of the mix means real staff, real space, real hands. This pillar sits under our services index, which covers all twelve service lines.
Community Management is part of Social Media Marketing, one of the twelve service lines Healthcare Marketing runs, and it belongs to the Authority pillar of the 4-Pillar Framework.
Who buys it, and what they already believe
The false belief they arrive with, and there are two. The first is that social media is measured in followers and likes. The second, more common among physicians, is that social is a compliance minefield where any post risks a HIPAA violation, so the safest posture is silence. Both are wrong in useful ways.
Explore the full guide
50 in-depth guidesThis page is the hub. The guides below apply Community Management to a specific specialty or a specific practice situation, because the work is not the same for a solo psychiatrist and a six-location orthopaedic group.
Start here — cornerstone guides
By specialty and situation
Behavioural health
Primary care
Medical
Diagnostic and acute
The complete index — all 50 guides in this pillar
02 — SearchThe queries this hub is built on
These are the queries that decide the build. Read the right-hand column as the work order: each one names a page that has to exist before the query can be won.
6 priority queries for Community Management. Keywords are intent-matched from the sitemap and are not volume-validated; confirm in a keyword tool before build.
Depth is a topical authority play that happens to produce volume
A twelve-page site can answer twelve questions, rank for twelve and be cited twelve times. A five-hundred-page site answers five hundred, and each new page strengthens the topical authority of every page already there. The entry tier is 500-plus pages, scaling to 10,000, and there is nothing below it. On top of the foundation, seven blogs a week produces more than 365 indexed pages a year.
WebFX analysed 130,070 healthcare queries in July 2025 and found that 51 percent trigger AI Overviews, roughly double the cross-industry rate, rising to 66.9 percent for informational queries. Google’s own documentation states that for topics affecting health, its systems give more weight to content aligned with strong E-E-A-T signals, and that of the four components, trust matters most.
03 — What owners care aboutThe questions this work has to answer
“Who is answering the comments?” HM is, within 2 to 4 hours during business hours, on an approved response framework with a documented escalation path. Clinical questions get redirected to the office, never answered. Complaints get moved offline in one reply, without confirming or denying that the person is a patient. Anything touching a clinical incident or a legal threat is escalated to the practice the same day. The response framework is written and approved during onboarding, so nobody is drafting policy at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday.
The problem
Usually the practice administrator, sometimes a physician-owner with an opinion, occasionally a marketing coordinator who inherited the accounts. The pattern is consistent: a front-desk staffer was handed the logins in 2021, posted enthusiastically for five weeks, and the last post is fourteen months old.
The solution
The response framework is written and approved during onboarding, so nobody is drafting policy at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday. “What are we supposed to post every day?” The Social Content Mix answers it before anyone has to be creative on demand.
The resolution
Competitive scan of the two or three local practices with active accounts. Identify the content pillars by specialty. Map the Social Content Mix to the 12-month blog architecture so education content is a repurposing job, not an origination job. Improve — Week 3 onward. Daily cross-platform content.
Thirty minutes with Steven. A diagnosis of where Community Management is costing you, not a pitch.
Schedule a Meeting04 — The delivery standardWhat actually gets done, and when
That last one usually produces the first uncomfortable conversation, and it should. Analyze — Week 2. Competitive scan of the two or three local practices with active accounts. Identify the content pillars by specialty. Map the Social Content Mix to the 12-month blog architecture so education content is a repurposing job, not an origination job. Improve — Week 3 onward.
05 — The first 90 daysWhat the build sequence looks like
Marketing timelines in this category are usually vague because vagueness is safer. Here is the published sequence, and it is the same one every engagement runs.
Brand book, then a workable site
The Brand Intelligence Book and brand guide are delivered in week one, before anything is designed or written. A workable site goes live in weeks two to three. Content and Google Business Profile work start in week one in parallel.
Press and local targeting
The first press release goes out in week five. Local targeting begins in weeks five to six, at roughly 25 pages per city-and-service target for every $1,000 per month of spend.
Depth, and the first movement
Local SEO moves in 2 to 4 months and organic rankings in 3 to 4, so this is the window where the first measurable change usually appears. Inquiries follow at 6 to 12 months, and the strongest returns at 12 to 18.
06 — Hard stopsWhat we will not do here
Every recommendation has a cost, a timeline and a thing it makes harder. These are the limits on Community Management, stated before the contract rather than after the first report.
The rules that bite in social media marketing. HM does not answer clinical questions in comments or direct messages. Redirect to the office, every time. HM does not buy followers, engagement or reviews. 16 CFR Part 465.8 prohibits fabricated indicators of social media influence and carries civil penalty authority. HM does not run undisclosed endorsements.
07 — Where it sitsCommunity Management in the 4-Pillar Framework
Community Management is one of three services inside Social Media Marketing, alongside organic social and social advertising. All three sit in the Authority pillar, and it takes the longest to build and compounds the hardest, so it starts in week one.
That sequence is not a preference. A practice that buys only this service will move slowly, because the twelve services have a dependency order and the 4-Pillar Framework encodes it. Nothing in Visibility gets sold before Infrastructure is in place or in flight, Authority starts in week one because it has the longest lead time, and Growth is only worth what the Infrastructure can convert.
08 — PricingWhat this costs, and why there is no band
Engagements start at $2,000 per month. That floor is published. There is no band above it, and the honest reason is that a band would be a fiction.
What a practice pays is set by how contested its market is, how large it is, and how much has to be built before anything can be amplified. Community Management is rarely bought alone, and where it is, we will say on the call whether it will do anything useful without the pillar beneath it. The number for a specific practice is given on that call rather than after three meetings.
No exclusivity, and the reason
We do not offer market exclusivity. An exclusivity promise is a promise to turn away a practice that needs the work. What we build instead is an asset a competitor cannot copy, because it is five hundred pages deep in the practice’s voice with its clinicians’ names on it.
The bottom line
Community Management is the authority work that makes the rest of the programme legible to a patient and to a search engine. It is bought as part of a sequence, not as a tactic. The next step is thirty minutes to find out whether it is the thing actually holding you back.
Frequently asked questions
How long before Community Management produces new patients?
Rankings move in 3 to 4 months, inquiries grow in 6 to 12 months, and the strongest returns arrive in 12 to 18 months. Local search moves faster, typically in 2 to 4 months. Those are the timelines we publish and they do not improve when a prospect asks. Anything faster is either paid media, which has its own economics and stops when the spend stops, or a promise nobody can substantiate. The compounding is the point: page 300 makes page 12 rank better, which is why the curve is slow at first and then is not.
Can we buy Community Management on its own?
Sometimes, and we will tell you on the call whether it will do anything useful by itself. Community Management sits in the Authority pillar, and it takes the longest to build and compounds the hardest, so it starts in week one. The most common way marketing money is wasted in healthcare is buying an amplification service before the thing being amplified is worth pointing at. If that is your situation we will say so before the contract rather than after the first report, which costs us a sale and saves you a quarter.
What will you not do in Community Management?
HM does not answer clinical questions in comments or direct messages. Redirect to the office, every time. HM does not buy followers, engagement or reviews. 16 CFR Part 465.8 prohibits fabricated indicators of social media influence and carries civil penalty authority. HM does not run undisclosed endorsements.
What does it cost?
Engagements start at $2,000 per month and we publish that floor. There is no band above it because a band would be misleading. Cost is driven by how contested the market is, how large the practice is, and how much has to be built before anything can be amplified. Local page production runs at roughly 25 pages per city-and-service target for every $1,000 per month of spend, which gives a concrete way to reason about what a given budget buys. The specific number comes on the first call, not after three meetings.
Who actually does the work?
Steven Lockhart is on strategy for every engagement and is the named principal you will reach. The firm is deliberately small and grows only at the rate that lets it hold the standards it publishes. Healthcare Marketing is healthcare-exclusive across thirty-two specialties, and the specialty register behind this work is researched per specialty rather than adapted from a general template.
What happens to the work if we leave?
It stays with the practice. The site, the content, the profiles, the analytics and the data. The site is the only asset in a marketing programme that the practice owns outright, that appreciates, and that cannot be removed by an algorithm change, a platform policy or a lapsed subscription. It is worth asking any agency this question directly and listening for whether the answer involves a proprietary platform, a template licence, or content that lives on infrastructure you do not control.
How we reviewed this page
Every statistic on this page carries its source at the point of use, and each source is listed below. Regulatory statements are cited to the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Google’s own published policy rather than to secondary summaries. The delivery standard and the hard stops are drawn from Healthcare Marketing’s own service register for Social Media Marketing, which is revised on the same cadence as this page.
Written and reviewed by Steven Lockhart, founder of Healthcare Marketing, who brings 25-plus years of marketing experience, 15-plus of it healthcare-exclusive. Healthcare Marketing is a marketing agency and does not employ clinicians, so nothing on this page is presented as clinical review. It is reviewed quarterly, and within 14 days of any Google core update or advertising-platform policy change that contradicts it.
What’s new: September 2026 — first publication.
References
- ftc.gov — https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2023/03/lurking-beneath-surface
- hhs.gov — https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/model-business-associate-agreement.pdf
- radiologyinfo.org — https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-mr
- Federal Trade Commission. Advertising and marketing business guidance. consumer.ftc.gov
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HIPAA for professionals: privacy. hhs.gov