Rewarding Your Top Fans
Sadly, we spend a great deal of our time and energy dealing with negative client experiences now more than ever. Online reviews, impatient clients, and COVID-precaution naysayers all leave us drained and occasionally questioning why we do what we do. Ever the optimist, I think there are a lot of solutions. Of course, we can ignore the jerks. We can respond to positive reviews and share them with the team members. We can highlight the positive case outcome stories and the "wins" in our team meetings and on our social media channels. We can eat ALL the donuts that those unicorn clients bring in. And now, we can celebrate our Facebook Top Fans!
What is a Top Fan?
Top fan badges are an optional setting on a practice's Facebook page. Once enabled, page followers can be eligible for a top fan badge on your page by being one of the most active followers. This means they frequently like, react, comment, or share your Facebook posts. Page followers who qualify for (and accept) top fan badges will have a badge next to their name on future interactions with the page. Their names will also be publicly visible on a "top fans" list, accessed on your page's community tab.
Why Should We Care About Top Fans?
These are the people who are voluntarily supporting our business online, with no incentive. They're active followers of the page, and it's almost guaranteed that they're doing so in a positive way. They're liking our posts, they're sharing our content within their own networks, and they're supportive in the comments. Our content clearly resonates with these followers. THESE ARE OUR PEOPLE!
Best of all, these are people who are using their own networks to serve as virtual ambassadors for our practices. When I've earned top fan badges on pages I follow, it's never something I've purposely worked for and is more of a nice surprise. I'm happy to support them. There's no perk or monetary reward - it's simply an online, automatic thank you from the page.
Enabling & Identifying Top Fans
First, enable Top Fan badges in your Facebook page settings. Navigate to Settings > Top Fan Badges > Click On.
Next, to find who earned your page's Top Fan designation, visit the toolbar under your practice's cover photo on a desktop, click "More," and then "Community." These users are updated automatically each week. You can review the user and the length of time they've been a top fan and remove them if necessary.
How This Helps Us
If you simply review the names and nothing else, it's a nice way to remind yourself that there ARE good clients - clients who value the work we do both in the clinic and online. There ARE members of our communities rooting for us to succeed and thrive. We've found reviewing this alone to be a positive experience for our whole team.
In my practice, we've chosen to take it a step further and send the clients who have been top fans for more than a month a small thank you note and sticker and put a small credit on their account. We share the list of top fans with our team in our Slack channel each month so all of our team members know the clients that are giving their support. We're focusing on the positive and rewarding GOOD - not negative - behavior.
Check out your top fans, and if time allows, consider thanking them for their support in-clinic and online with a quick message, email or note in the mail and focus on the good. Hang in there, teams!
​-C. DeWilde, DVM