Get known: social media for allied health and therapy practices
Proof, not noise.
Social media for allied health practices does one job well: it shows a parent, a patient or a support coordinator who is already deciding that your practice is real, current and run by people they would trust. Go Forth Digital plans and produces the content for owner-led physio, psychology, OT and speech practices across Australia, checks every post against your board's rules, and connects it to the page and the profile that take the booking.
Go Forth Digital is run by a founder who has worked a physiotherapy front desk processing private health and NDIS payments, run a gym P&L, and spent five years building health and wellness websites.
What does social media for allied health include?
Seven pieces of work. The strategy is one page long and the content plan comes from the front desk's phone log, not from a trends list.
Most practice social media is a clinician posting on a Sunday night because someone said they should. It stops after six weeks, and the last post from March tells every visitor the practice is asleep. The system below removes the Sunday night:
- A one-page strategy. Which platforms, for which audience, how often, who approves, and what the practice will never post. Written once, revised each quarter, short enough that the front desk reads it.
- A monthly content plan from real questions. The twenty questions patients ask by phone, the funding pathways people get wrong, what happens in a first appointment, who the clinicians are. Each post links to the service page that answers the question in full, so the post and the site agree.
- Production in the clinic. Short video and stills shot on a phone in your rooms, with the clinician who does the work. Captions written in the practice's voice, alt text on every image, no stock photography of smiling strangers.
- Google Business Profile posts. The social channel a patient sees while choosing, sitting under your reviews in Search and Maps. Updates, offers with their terms, and event posts, refreshed before Google archives them at six months (Google Business Profile Help).
- Referrer-facing LinkedIn. GPs, paediatricians, support coordinators and plan managers do not follow a practice on Instagram. They check LinkedIn before a referral, and what they want to see is availability, registration, intake speed and report turnaround, in that order.
- Community groups, with rules. NDIS and parent Facebook groups are where families ask for a recommendation. We write the rules of engagement: answer the question, name the practice once, never post a review, never reply to a health question in public.
- Compliance and consent. Every post checked against the Ahpra social media guidance or your association's policy. Written consent before any client, child or carer appears, under the OAIC's rule that a patient image collected in providing a health service is health information (OAIC, updated 5 September 2024).
Does social media fill an allied health calendar?
On its own, rarely. It is where a patient checks you, not where they find you. Both numbers below are true at the same time.
21.0 million
active social media user identities in Australia in October 2025, 77.7% of the population.
DataReportal, Digital 2026: Australia, 5 November 2025.
0.15%
average engagement rate on Facebook business pages, across 25 million posts from 130,683 pages, January 2024 to December 2025.
Socialinsider, 23 March 2026.
Nearly everyone is there, and almost nobody reacts to a business page. That is not a contradiction. A parent who was given your name by a friend opens Instagram to see whether the clinic looks like a place their child will tolerate. A support coordinator opens Facebook to see whether the practice is still taking participants. Neither of them likes the post. Both of them book, or do not, on what they saw. Social media is the last check before the enquiry, and the job is to pass it.
No Australian survey we have found splits allied health bookings by "found on social" against "found on Google", so we do not claim one. What we measure is narrower and honest: enquiries that mention a post, profile clicks that reach the booking page, and whether the referrers who follow you send more. The finding side of Get found lives on SEO, AI visibility and pay-per-click ads.
Which platforms, for which practice?
Two at most. A practice with two to fifteen clinicians cannot feed four platforms, and a thin presence on four is worse than none.
Facebook and Instagram for a paediatric speech, OT or physio practice, because that is where parents are. The under-16 minimum age law that commenced on 10 December 2025 keeps the children themselves off the age-restricted platforms (OAIC, 23 October 2025), which changes nothing for a practice: the parent was always the one deciding. Instagram for a psychology practice offering telehealth to adults, and LinkedIn for the same practice's EAP and GP relationships. Facebook groups and LinkedIn for positive behaviour support and NDIS-focused OT, because coordinators and plan managers live in both. Instagram and the Google Business Profile for a physio clinic, where a thirty-second exercise clip does more than a paragraph about it.
Whatever the platform, the account belongs to the practice, the passwords sit in your password manager, and we work as an added user. If you leave, you remove us.
What can a registered practice post?
Most things a clinician would say across the desk. The lines are around patients, not around the practice.
A clinician explaining what a functional capacity assessment involves, a front desk walkthrough of a plan-managed NDIS booking, what a mental health care plan covers and what it does not, an exercise demonstrated by the physio who prescribes it, a new clinician's registration and the hours they have open. All of that is education and availability, and none of it needs a patient in frame.
What stays off: a patient's kind comment reposted as a story, because on your account it is a testimonial. A child's face without a signed consent that names where the image will be used. A "results" post, because Dietitians Australia's standards rule out before-and-after photos and guaranteed results (Dietitians Australia, 12 August 2025) and the Ahpra guidelines reach the same place through unreasonable expectation of benefit. Speech Pathology Australia's advertising policy names client stories as a form of testimonial and holds members responsible for staff posts on accounts they control (Speech Pathology Australia, March 2024). A public reply to a parent's question about their child, because the answer is health information in the open.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits a practice that people ask about by name and that has service pages worth sending them to.
It suits a paediatric practice whose parents compare three clinics on Instagram before they ring one. It suits a psychology practice building telehealth demand across a state. It suits a positive behaviour support or OT practice that lives on coordinator referrals and needs to be visibly open, registered and current every week. It suits a multi-clinician practice with a new hire whose diary needs to be seen.
It does not suit a practice with no service pages yet; social media sends people somewhere, and a homepage with a phone number is not somewhere. Start with websites and intake. It does not suit a solo clinician; post to your Google Business Profile once a month and spend the money on nothing else. It does not suit an owner who expects social media to replace search, and we will say that in the first conversation rather than the sixth month. For pricing see what it costs.
What we will not do
- Repost a patient's comment, review or message on your account. It becomes a testimonial the moment it is on a page you control.
- Put a client, a child or a carer in a post without a signed consent that says where the image will appear and for how long.
- Post every day. A practice with two to fifteen clinicians has two or three things worth saying a week. Daily posting fills the gap with noise and the noise is what a new visitor sees first.
- Buy followers, run giveaways for likes, or use engagement bait. The numbers go up and the enquiries do not.
- Follow a trend the clinician would not say across a desk. A physio lip-syncing to a sound is content; it is not the content that makes a WorkCover patient book.
- Lead the monthly report with followers and reach. Those go in the appendix. Enquiries and profile clicks to the booking page go on page one.
Questions owners ask
Does social media bring bookings for an allied health practice?
Indirectly, and less than the agencies selling it say. The patient with a problem this week finds you on Google or in an AI answer; social media is where they check you before they ring. Where it does produce bookings on its own is in the slow decisions: a parent deciding over a term whether their child needs an assessment, an adult who has thought about seeing a psychologist for a year, a coordinator choosing between two registered providers. For those, a practice that has been visibly open, current and competent for months wins the enquiry when the decision lands. We measure enquiries that mention a post and profile clicks that reach the booking page, and we tell you if the numbers do not justify the fee.
What does it cost?
Social media is part of one integrated service, not a package on its own. Within a retainer, usually $1,500 to $2,500 a month ex GST on a three-month initial term then rolling, it covers the strategy, the monthly plan, production from footage shot in your clinic, the compliance check, scheduling and the report. Any paid promotion of a post is media, billed to your card and run under pay-per-click ads. For most practices social media is a smaller share of the retainer than search or intake, because that is where the bookings come from, and we scope it that way. Tell us what you need and we will quote it in writing; the cost guide sets out the market ranges.
How often should a practice post?
Two or three times a week on the main platform, once a fortnight on the Google Business Profile, and once a week on LinkedIn if referrers matter to you. Less than that and the account looks abandoned to a parent checking it on a Tuesday night. More than that and a practice runs out of true things to say, and starts posting quotes on gradients. The rhythm matters more than the count: a visitor scrolls to see whether the last post was this month and whether the people in it look like people they would let treat their child. Consistency is what a small practice can do that a large one often cannot.
Can we share client stories?
Not as testimonials, and for regulated professions that is what a client story usually is. Section 133 of the National Law prohibits testimonials in advertising a regulated health service, and Ahpra's guidance applies that to social media accounts the practice controls. Speech Pathology Australia's policy says the same for its members. What you can do: tell a general, de-identified story about what a course of treatment involves, with no individual identifiable and no outcome promised; show the clinician explaining the process; and let patients leave reviews on Google, where you do not control the platform and are not responsible for the content. If a client wants to speak publicly about the practice, they can do it on their own account, in their own words, without a prompt from you.
Who writes and films it?
We write it, from a monthly interview with you or a clinician and the questions the front desk logs. Filming happens in your clinic on a phone, in one block of about ninety minutes a month, with the clinicians who do the work; that block produces eight to twelve pieces. The clinician reviews every post that touches clinical content before it goes anywhere, and a named person at the practice approves the month's plan in one sitting. You are not asked to think of something to post on a Sunday night. If a clinician is happier on camera than on paper, we build the plan around that; if nobody wants to be filmed, we build it around stills, the rooms and the words.
How do you report it?
Monthly, one page first. Enquiries that mention social media at intake, profile clicks that reached the booking page, and referrer follows gained on LinkedIn. Then what we published, what the clinician reviewed, and the posts that a new visitor sees first when they check the account. Reach and follower counts sit in the appendix, because they are the numbers that go up without a booking. The report reads beside the search and ads reports, so you can see which channel the calendar is coming from and move the retainer toward it.
Tell us what you need
Bring the last three months of posts, or the account nobody has touched since March. We will look at it the way a parent or a coordinator does, and tell you whether social media is the next thing to fix or the fourth.