How Social Media Built a 9-Month Waitlist for This Doctor

Social Media as Patient Education 0:00

Exosome stem cell IV like I'm just sitting in a chair with a bunch of stuff hooked up to me and Of course that goes viral spirit. What are you doing? And then the next one is everybody's asking me my thoughts on those things Because they want to know if I think they're good not good the research behind it so then you get to educate right so if you're a Clinic that does that sort of thing I don't even have that in my clinic. So it just builds off of that. The guy that did the injection into my neck, I had 60,000 people look at it and then I tagged him on that post.

There was 2,000 clicks to his website on one story. I get a text message later. He's like, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Of course. Yeah. You know, and it's just it's because I believe in it. I literally did it. I had it in my neck. I sent so many other clients back to his practice because it's something I needed for my clients to go do that were stuck in fight or flight. What if aging isn't about slowing down, but leveling up? I'm Dr. Izzy Jones. This is the Longevity Leaders podcast. Welcome everybody to the Longevity Leaders podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Rudy Mueller. And to my left here is Dr. Jaben Moore. Pleasure to have you, man. Thanks for having me today. Yeah, I mean, this is a very interesting topic for most practitioners, but I'm especially interested to go in and dive deep into this. Javen has really grown his social media following, and I would think that that has therefore helped you with your practice and becoming more financially stable and helping more people. I'm curious, what was the big catalyst for you to launch into the social media space?

Honestly, this podcast could go on for probably two hours, but try to keep it as simple as possible here. Well, let me start off and just say this because every time I say it on stage it makes people feel better I personally don't like social media. Yeah, I'm with you there man. Like I like being able to educate people I love that part. So what motivates me is when I've been asked What's your big hairy audacious goal? I'm just like, I don't know. I don't think like that that's just not the way my brain operates when you when you go to like mastermind groups, but It's come to me that I really like educating people and giving them the ability to have real informed consent.

So I need to start off the this type of topic like that, because for so many doctors, social media, whether it didn't exist when they were saying high school, like Facebook came out when I was in college, so that's me a little bit. I never really wanted to be on social media like I just didn't have a drive for it but now after having a social media and getting up to across my social media is more than a million followers I can say that clients have come in they're like I didn't know this I didn't know that And for a guy that had Lyme disease myself, I wish there was more information out there.

So now I'm like, okay, I can educate people. So that's, that's why I keep doing it. But she asked, why did I do it? Why I did it was fear. It was COVID. And I had a referral only practice that I was very happy with that had grown enough that I had a second doctor working for me and I was comfortable. And then COVID hits and you know, the first month patients weren't coming in the same. And I remember having like a three, four week wait list all the time, even with an extra doctor. And it dropped to where we had somebody come in that day.

And it just kind of hit me in the throat. And I was like, I am responsible for generating a business that pays my employees bills. And it was a small practice, like these are friends. And I was like, okay, something has to change. And I looked at my staff, I kind of got us all together, go, This is the way that my brain operated. I love numbers. If one out of every hundred people that heard my name from a referral came in before, I have no idea what that number was.

Why Social Media Became Necessary 4:06

It's going to be one in 500 now. So we've got to talk to more people. We've got to get our face in front of more people. I go, fine, I'm going to go live. This is when going live worked. It doesn't anymore, by the way. It might come back, but who knows? It did not work and it doesn't work now. I went live on Facebook and I said, I'm going to do this for six months straight every day. And I went from one time a day to two times a day to three times a day. And by the way, it doesn't matter how long you're live.

It was just live. And I went live While I was still with a girl I went on a date with and we were still together because I hadn't gone live that day and I wasn't going to break my streak, my commitment. It was like to my team, right? Like it was to my team to do this. No, the relationship did not work out. I'm sure you're shocked. I went, I went live and we were still together. I was like, I got to do this. I made a commitment. And I grew a Facebook group at the time, which was kind of one of the bigger things that people were doing, to 10,000 over a few months.

And yes, it absolutely changed everything. I went from people walking in that day to a nine-month wait list in a matter of a couple months. That's amazing. So starting out at Facebook, getting people into a Facebook group, continuing to educate them through that platform, and then developing a wait list practice right off of that. Yeah. And then we went from there in like three or four months later, I was like, Hey, we should post like some posts to Instagram. Not that we knew what we were doing.

Right. Right. Um, and I look back at some of the stuff and I just laugh at like what we, what we were producing, like what our content looked like, how bad I was at speaking, how horrible I looked on stage. My staff still makes fun of me because I had just a straight up buzz cut and they're like, you can't do that anymore. You gotta make your hair nicer. You gotta, You got to do all these things. I mean, I went through the gamut and my team is brutal when it comes to just making fun of me. I mean, they enjoy finding the craziest comments on our social media and they'll make placemats out of it for our team lunches.

just from the craziest comments that you could think of, that are probably not appropriate for any podcast to be said. And it's just like, we just have fun with it now. And it's all about educating and you know, a woman came into my practice the other day and she's like, I found you on Instagram. She's local to Kansas City and she came in and she literally told me, she's like, for the first time in my adult life, I don't think about killing myself because she found my Instagram. and came in and I found that there was mold in her house.

And she's now thriving. And she didn't even know that was possible. It's not that she wouldn't do stuff to help her health. She didn't know it was even possible that that symptom was a symptom and not just that she was broken. And she literally said, I just saw you on Instagram. And for a guy that doesn't love social media because of all the problems that it causes on the back end for our kids and everything else, I'm like, okay, so we are doing some good. If you're a medical doctor, nurse practitioner, chiropractor, or other health expert that's stuck in a broken system, There's a better way.

The Freedom webinar shows you a proven five step system to build a seven figure virtual health practice or how to modernize your current brick and mortar practice without the burnout. Learn to create high ticket programs, automated income, residual revenue, and attract clients ready to work with you. Book your million dollar strategy session today by clicking the link in the description. And that fear that you had, I mean, what a change to be able to help somebody like that to come in. I think that one of the beautiful things about having referral-only practice is that you have patients coming in that are obviously being referred by a trusted person who's gone through the process that I'm sure they've asked and had multiple questions for that individual about what the process is like.

So they're already pre-educated. They're not coming in blind and you're having to, but now with the video, it is basically almost as if not more beneficial as a referral, right? Oh, I've, I got stories all day. We, like you said, we can go a few hours. So, um, I in practice did some weird things. I was a guy that would do some muscle testing. I would do some acupuncture. I would do a lot of lab testing in my practice. So one of my patients, uh, and I love her, she probably helped build my practice.

When I very first got into practice, she was such a huge referral source. Um, She would just say that I was her voodoo doctor And at first I was really offended by this honestly as I'm just like I went to school for a long time

Choosing the Right Platform 9:20

Everything I'm doing is science-backed I'm like here's all the labs that prove that you have mold or lime or whatever that you're working on But she just, she, that's what she would call me. And when people would come in, I realized after a little while that when people called me to her, like when she called me her voodoo doctor, when they came in, they were ready for whatever. And like, they weren't going to ask any like negative type of questions. They were just like in for whatever. Cause they were, they were so to the point of their health where they just wanted help that they would go to the voodoo doctor.

So this was before social media. Right. And. So eventually I just started wearing it more like a positive statement and I was like, Oh, you're coming in that way. Then I know we're going to get along. Right. Right. So it's like pre-selected referrals, which is what we all would love to have. Cause you have that one patient that you don't want any more of that one. And there's like, Oh, I'm going to refer my friend. You're going, Oh, um, right. Yeah. Oh, you know, it's just like, I don't know if we get along in that way.

And, When social media came around, it was even more pre-selected people because now people come and they already know my opinions. They already know what I think about every diet. They already know what my mindset is around Lyme disease and Epstein-Barr, and they already know how I talk. They already know that I'm pretty analytical. They already know that I am pretty direct, right? They know me so much differently. They're educated on the basics. So I don't even have to go into, for many of them, hygiene products or toxic that come from your big box stores.

They don't have to, they're not gonna question when I say your tap water's toxic. They already know I'm gonna say that. They're already ready for most likely what I'm gonna bring to them, at least in some regard. They know the supplement companies I like. They know the lab companies I like. They're coming in as if they've hung out with me. Can you imagine how that changes your practice? If every person that walked into your practice had already spent, you know, six hours going through all of your content, all of your webinars, all of your training, how that accelerates the speed that you can even work with someone in office.

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking not only knowledge, but just the trust that they have in you, because they wouldn't be coming to you if they didn't already trust you, right? And so that eliminates so many of these different barriers that come out from cold marketing, right? So as a physician who does not do enough social media, where is the first place to start? said to ourselves, we're going to go ahead, we're going to start social media. Where would you recommend? Obviously, it's not Facebook lives anymore, but like we're currently in this type of network or environment.

So when I get asked this question, I got to get to know the provider and their skills and also their practice type, right? So if you need to generate leads quickly, then you're probably going to go to Instagram and you're going to start doing reels and carousels as we sit right now today and and you can put the date on this right here because that's what's working today and it'll change in three to six months right it just changed three months ago and you just have to look at the social media landscape of the one that you're jumping into and say what's working and just look for patterns So I would say go to Instagram right now because you can get something that can go viral quickly.

It's to the right age demographic for functional medicine longevity providers to actually market to. Because if you look at TikTok, it's more for younger individuals at least. The majority, if you look at the age bracket, is going to be a little younger. And the type of items that you can sell through TikTok, or TikTok shop, it's all cheap China junk, right? So people on there are looking for cheaper items, not longevity care that typically costs a little bit more. And so you have to look at what your needs are as a clinic, as a provider.

If you need leads, go to Instagram. If you don't need the leads right now, but you want to build a reputation and you want to get leads over time to grow, then you probably want to consider podcasting. You want to consider doing YouTube because that long form content, which is not popular on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook right now, will absolutely build a higher level of trust. It will give more information. It will have long-term more trust built, but it takes much longer to grow on long-form platforms because it's not people just scrolling through quickly.

Oh, that caught my interest. And so your growth pattern is going to be different based off of the content type that you're better at. And for me, the best platform that I've jumped on was just Instagram because what we did like at 2021 when I started, Instagram was the big thing. I did jump into TikTok. I grew 50,000 followers in a month and it generated almost no leads to a complex chronic illness practice. Right? Wrong niche for that. If I would have had a supplement brand, that would have been awesome.

Right, right, right. So... I was like, I'm not gonna keep doing this. And I didn't know how to do TikTok at the time. I legitimately, all I did was go to TikTok. I looked at what was going viral. I saw what formats worked. I saw what topics were working that aligned with stuff that I wanted to talk about. And then I put my type of spin on those topics with my information. So I did not copy someone else, but I saw it was working, no different than, If I'm dealing with a patient and I'm struggling, I'm going to call friends and like, what are you doing for this?

Right? Like, I'm not going to do it exactly your way, but I want to figure out what is working and then I make it my own. And that's social media. That's all it is. Literally pattern recognition. Is there a particular format that you try to run or is it just, hey, today I'm going to talk about X, Y or Z? Are you planning these things months out with your team? I laugh really hard because when I started this, it was like me and my office manager. We had like three employees, right? So it was me and her and she was doing it in between talking to patients on a call and we were posting.

So then we eventually hired a health coach that was a writer. She's an introvert, which she was a person that had been unwell. And when I hired her to be a health coach on my team, she's like, I want to write a book about parasites. And I really love writing and I really love not talking to people, basically, is what I got out of the interview. And I'm like, I didn't hire her, right? It didn't make sense. So I hired someone else. And then I was like, man, I need somebody to help me with content.

What was that girl's name? And I hired her. She was with us for like five years. She actually recently left. And she actually still does stuff with us. Like we love her. She just found a really great opportunity. She left the team and she was crying. We were crying because we were friends at this point. And that was scary to me. And what happened, why it was scary to me was because all of our growth happened with her and I together. Like we were a team. So I'm like, was she good at social media or was I good at social media?

Were we good at social media? Like, what is the dynamic and am I about to like crash and burn and like growth? And at first, yeah, we crashed and burned because she was doing a lot of the backend stuff that I don't have time for.

Building a Repeatable Content System 17:08

As I brought on a new team, I had to retrain them. Well, fast forward a few months, we're back up to growing actually faster than when she left. I was like, okay, so there is a system to this. There is a process to this. I didn't know what I was doing a little bit. Not taking anything away from the woman who left, because she was amazing, and I wish she was still on my team. But we did have a process that is replicatable, which was, it's honestly, that feels good to me, because I know that As team comes and goes and I never want him to leave but as they come and go like we can keep going growing and into that also means that I could reproduce this potentially for someone else which we've we've now done for another doctor we've reproduced this process and it's working for a friend of mine who is in need.

And it comes down to the algorithm of the social media you want to grow on determines what type of content you're going to put out. And it's going to change. Right, right. So you can't plan three months in advance because the algorithm is going to change. You're going to throw away all your content. So you can get a week or two in advance, and when you're really, really smooth, you might get to a month in advance, maybe. But you also have to know that if the algorithm shifts, which it did a couple months ago, I have 40 videos that are now in the trash can.

Like they're just not useful. We might post them if I go to a conference or a podcast. I'm speaking somewhere, but we know they're not gonna do well We just know that so you have to keep up with what's happening right now, which is also Traumatizing to everyone listening right now. Yeah, because like I don't want to keep up with the trends. I don't want to pivot I don't they're like I want someone to do that for me and well, maybe you can hire someone to do that for you I've seen a couple companies that were okay.

No, but So you have to know what the format is. So for instance, back in the beginning, it was Instagram Lives. It went live. That was what was working. That's what they were pushing out. Then it was carousels. Then it was reels. Now for Instagram, it's somewhere between reels and carousels, but it's not just that. It's also that they want the length of your reel and the length of time someone watches it that those two things are what matters. So if you make a minute long reel and they watch it for 10 seconds, it is going to get 200 views and die.

If it's 60 seconds and they watch it twice, it is gonna go off like crazy and go to millions. It's really hard for people to stay paying attention for 60 seconds, especially multiple times, which is why right now the content is really short and you have to watch it a couple of times to read it because that's what the algorithm wants, so that's what influencers are doing. So it's not what you wanna produce, it's what the algorithm tells you is going to work. And it's also about shares, and it's also about saves.

So if you're really niche, like, niched down, right? So pick a really small niche for me. I mean, I would think longevity, but even more so than that, let's say utilizing NAD, like mitochondrial health. I'm gonna say wrong. Longevity is a massive topic. Longevity is massive. So inside of that. So that is a broad topic that a lot of people are interested in. So when you post that, everybody across the entirety of the internet probably wants to know how to feel better longer. Right. Right. Everyone.

Sure. I mean, even high schoolers don't want to die, and they want to feel young forever. So they might be interested in that topic. Mitochondria is super niche because nobody knows what the heck that is. That's not a doctor, right? But energy's not. Want more energy? Ten ways to get more energy. Who doesn't wanna click that? If you make it interesting and really wide, then a lot of people will click and look at it. You're like, yeah, but that's not gonna convert patients. No, it's not, but it might get followers.

You're like, but I don't care about followers, I want patients. I get it and I'm kind of jumping in there because that's the conundrum that you fall into. It's like, well, I want to get business. I don't really care how many followers I have, right? Most of us don't. So you still have to understand that if you go into a cave and yell all your information into a cave and no one on the planet hears it, no matter how good it is, which is you making your niche down content that is your style, that is not gonna follow the algorithm, you're gonna change no one's life.

You're not gonna help anyone. So what you have to do is you have to figure out that funnel. Just like every other business has a funnel, that's the social media funnel. You go out and you create content that is gonna go viral. It still has to be authentic to you. It still has to be true and you're using it to to educate, but it has to still go viral. And then you can do in between that and you can put posts out there that are about you. Right, like I've got a post pen to the top, that's me, that's my story.

I got a post pen to the top that is like a client testimonial of experience they've had. And when somebody's really buying into me and they want to learn, okay, like who is this guy? I'm kind of interested in his stuff. They can go look at those. But they have to self-select to go look at it because it's never gonna go viral. So you put those in there in between stuff that you might want to go viral. You put stories up. And you still got to make your story go viral, by the way. If you just post, come see me, five people are going to see that.

I don't care if you have a million followers. But if you post something like, oh, I don't know, a picture of me with a needle going into my neck that's four inches long, because it's a biohack for stimulating the vagus nerve with procaine, it'll get 60,000 views. And then the next one, work with me, which got 50,000 views. So it's still thinking through the process of marketing through social media to educate because everybody's like, what the heck did you just stick in your neck? And I'm like, well, for all of you that are in fight or flight that are stuck, you can do neural therapy and this can help you.

So you're creating that funnel and. You've just got to figure out what is going on right now and how it works right now because it used to be niche down social media. Not anymore. It's all fluff. And you've got to figure out how to create fluff flow to a little bit more educational to get on my email list, get my get on my text message list, which I mean, we've grown 50,000 emails off of social media and like the last 45 days. That's amazing. We've gotten thousands of text message phone numbers Thousands, and I don't even know the number because I asked and then she's like I'll go look at it and I'm in here now In the last like 30 days thousands So make sure you're giving them good stuff, right?

So we're giving out free guides, we're giving out free courses, we're giving out links to podcasts because people want information and once they've gotten

Viral Clinical Content and Trust 24:28

to you, they've given you a little trust. So don't burn that trust either. Make sure you're taking care of the people that give you their trust. But social media is a great way to get the first connection. It's like what summits used to be, kinda. And then we burnt out people's trust on summits because we sent them thousands of emails of garbage. And then summits stopped working. So, what I'm hearing you say, I mean, followers are the eyes that are looking at your ads, right? Like you're thinking about print media, where you send out mailers, right?

Gaining followers is like sending out those mailers. And the mailers peak a person's interests, so they're going to reach out, but you're going to provide value to them that they now learn a little bit more about you, your story, your background, your way of thinking, you're educating them on a particular topic that will hit home for them. And then from there, now providing them complimentary free information that's downloadable. Now you're captured their information, email, phone number, name, some demographics.

And then that allows it to continue on in the conversation with you about becoming a potential patient. Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect, man. All right, awesome. Now I got to get started on Instagram. You got to get started on Instagram. And you know, there's a lot of software out there where we use it. Later.com is one of them. There's a ton of them that you can post to everything else through it. So you go post to Instagram natively. Like I actually do actually post on Instagram through Instagram's apps.

And that's the one that I care about the most. And you will get a positive bump in the algorithm if you post natively to each thing. Or you go to later.com and it posts for you. It gives you a small decrease on accounts and it'll post to everything else. So you can be on threads, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube from one button. So you can be on everything, that way you're out there. Each one individually is different on what's gonna go viral. So if you want to grow, you have to make individualized content per specific to that platform.

Per platform, yes. So it can be an all day job and the next question you're gonna be like, how much time do you spend, right? Is that the next question? That's exactly what I'm thinking, yeah. Yeah, so I spend one hour a week now that much teams trained again on a team meeting a social media team meeting and we go through where I want to go because I hate to say this but I have to go scroll and see what I think is working and topics I like and There's people that I follow that it's because I know that they both are in health space and align with me.

So I follow them to see what they're doing, to see what's working for them. So then I'm like, hey, let's look at doing this type of format. And then I want to use this type of topic and I can send a reel of the format and I can send my content my what I do and what my personal thoughts are because I have my team shadow me like they literally get on calls with me and shadow me being a doctor because I'm still in practice. Right so that they can understand what I'm doing and then we create content Right so that they they understand the direction I come from the format from social media We we go over that we build out how much I want to put on we're doing two to three posts a day on Instagram And then I spent about two hours a week at most recording to get out two to three pieces per day nice So I mean that's one heck of a system that you've developed there It took some time, a lot of iterations, a lot of failures, a lot, I mean, just like everything else.

Your practice, how long did it take you to build all the systems to have the front desk? And it's constantly, constantly changing, right? Yeah. And there's so much tech out there now, like Stampede Social is another piece of technology that we use. So you want to engage when people comment. So An AI will literally write out a response and you can just click yes or response. I put yes or no on on that comment. So you don't have to type, you have to think for you based off of all the information from you.

Yeah, he's getting pretty wild out there, but you know the biggest thing for social media is be interesting Aligned with how the algorithm wants you to be interesting So jab yourself in the neck is what you're saying kind of yeah I'll go to a conference and I'll sit down and and I will go to A red light share. I'll go to a hyperbaric chamber. I'll go to IV ozone and I'll get stuff done to me. I mean, one of my other really positive like story posts, like when I say positive, like viral ones was me getting a peptide Exosome stem cell IV like I'm just sitting in a chair with a bunch of stuff hooked up to me and Of course that goes viral experience.

What are you doing? And then the next one is everybody's asking me my thoughts on those things Because they want to know if I think they're good not good the research behind it so then you get to educate right so if you're a Clinic that does that sort of thing I don't even have that in my clinic. So it just builds off of that. The guy that did the injection into my neck, I had 60,000 people look at it and then I tagged him on that post. There was 2,000 clicks to his website on one story. I get a text message later.

He's like, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Of course. Yeah. You know, and it's just it's because I believe in it. I literally did it. I had it in my neck. I sent so many other clients back to his practice because it's something I needed for my clients to go do that were stuck in fight or flight. But 2000, I posted it again a couple of months later and there's I think there were like 600 clicks to his website for the next time. And it was just one post in there of just me getting jabbed in the neck.

Developing powerful relationships through the social media too. So that's great, man. That's awesome. Well, I know we could go on for a long time here, but I really do appreciate your time. I mean, there's one final thing, final question that I have for you. What's the action step for anybody that's contemplating this? Okay, we want to go on Instagram. What's that one action step right now? Just do it. Just do it. You're not going to do it right. You're not going to do it well. You're not going to go viral your first time.

And if you do, teach me and just do it just literally do it like i went live just go post something and learn yeah so here's the format post a reel every

Getting Started on Instagram 31:28

day for 14 days figure out which one did the best learn why that did the best Change your strategy to be more like that. Do it for 14 days. Figure out which one did the best. Repeat. And you'll get better and better and better. Now could you hire a social media team with professional video editors and a team that has a lot of really good already marketing skills? So they, they know the psychology of a hook, which is the title. They know the psychology of the first three seconds. Yes. All of that matters.

But if you're a single provider, single person, just go post. Just start. All right, so this is a challenge to all of you. 14 days straight. Thank you, Dr. Moore. Javin, appreciate you, my man. And I look forward to seeing your continued success on Instagram. And whatever else you stick me, stick a needle next, or whatever crazy thing you do. Appreciate it, dude. And man, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Longevity Leaders podcast. A Longevity Leaders community is on mission to transform a hundred million lives by 2040. If you enjoyed the show, please share this with somebody that you know, especially another doctor or physician, but also click that follow button.

Until next time, stay strong and live long.