Social Media Marketing for Dentists

Dental social media marketing seems like a no-brainer for promoting your practice, right? It’s “free” and everybody uses it, so why not?

The truth is, improper social media marketing is not only ineffective, but can also negatively impact your overall marketing strategy.

Before you get started with social media marketing for your dental office, you need to decide if it’s right for you and follow the proper steps to do it right. The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Dental Practices will help you do just that. Download the guide today.

Your first question about dental social media marketing is probably “do we really need it?” While more than 75% of dental practices use social media to attract patients, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good fit for your office. There are a number of pro’s and con’s to consider when deciding whether or not to add it to your marketing mix.

Why dental professionals should use social media marketing

There are many ways to use social media. Dental marketing on social platforms is a great way to boost your brand. Here’s how it can benefit your practice: 

Build your brand

For dentists, social media is a great way to showcase your brand’s personality. By incorporating digital marketing techniques through your social media pages, you can boost your practice’s reputation and extend your reach beyond traditional advertising methods. While your paid advertising promotes the benefits of coming to your practice, social media gives patients some insight about you and your team. This helps you start to build a relationship with patients before they even set foot in your office. Social media can also be a great opportunity for dentists to share knowledge and develop their status in the community as trusted healthcare providers. 

Attract new patients

Social media channels can be a very effective way to target new patients for your practice. Some of this can be accomplished through organic reach, but paid ads can target people based on several demographic and behavioral characteristics, allowing you to zero in on your ideal patients. Interacting with the people who engage with your dental social media posts through likes, shares, and comments also helps to show new patients how actively involved you are and can amplify your reach.

Connect with your current patients

Engaging current patients is just as important as trying to reach new patients. Sharing content that reminds them of the importance of dental care and informs them of new advances in dental technology can help keep them connected to your team. Connected patients  are also more likely to recommend your office to people they are connected with online. 

Improve your SEO

Humans aren’t the only ones paying attention to your activity on social media. Search engines also get ranking signals from your social media activity, so the more active you are on social media, the better your chances of moving up the rankings. By linking to content on your site from your social channels, you can help improve your SEO and authority. 

Things to consider

Time

If you’re managing your own social media marketing, it can be very time-consuming. Generating dental social media marketing ideas, creating content, and posting consistently requires more effort than you and your team members may think. Sharing the responsibilities among multiple people in your office can help spread the burden, but be realistic about the total amount of time you plan to spend on social media before diving in.

Money

Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are free, but that doesn’t mean marketing through them is free. Until you build up an audience with your organic content, you’ll likely need to spend money to reach enough people to make a difference. Creating certain types of content may cost money, too, especially if you want to include photography and video in your strategy.

If social media marketing works for your dental practice, you don’t want to take a shotgun approach and be on as many social channels as possible. You’ll be far more effective if you focus your efforts on the channels that will have the biggest impact as part of your social media marketing strategy.

It is no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of social media platforms currently active across the web. Luckily, effective social media management for dentists only requires that your practice is active and engaged on a handful of platforms to build brand awareness and reach your target audience.

Ready to start creating social media marketing for dental clinics? Just like with any other marketing strategies, you need a plan if you want to be successful. Let’s start formulating your social media marketing plan by looking at who you’ll be targeting, how often you’ll engage with them, what content you’ll be sharing, and how you can produce that content.

Your audience

If you have personas defined for your ideal dental patients (you really should), then you already have a clear picture of who you are trying to engage with through social media. Sharing content that is tailored to your audience will greatly increase the amount of engagement you generate, as well as the size of the online following you build.

Starting out without any following may mean you need to pay to put your content in front of new people. Sharable content will help your audience grow. Get your team members involved and encourage employees to share dental social media posts with their own connections to help your reach expand faster.

Consider adding pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media and search engines to get additional traction or reach people outside of your organic circles. The targeting options available will allow you to zero in on your ideal patients based on demographics and interests.

Your content

Once you know your audience, you need to plan what kind of social content you’ll produce. Dentists can deploy a variety of content types, including:

• Educational articles on dental health
• Interactive polls about oral hygiene
• Patient testimonials 
• Informative videos about new treatments. 

Think about who your ideal patient is and create content geared towards their specific needs and interests. Remember that some content works well as written posts, while other content works better when presented as images or videos.

A big mistake many dentists make is being too self-promotional on social media. Try to limit that type of content to less than 20% of all your organic dental social media posts. It’s okay to ask for something occasionally, but if you’re too pushy, you’ll lose your followers quickly. Save the sales-y stuff for your social media ads.

Decide on one person who will be your writer, photographer, and/or videographer for your content. It could be a member of your team or someone you outsource the creative work to. Either way, a single person should “own” your social media strategy. The responsibility should be clearly defined and entrusted to someone who can handle it well.

Your schedule

Although there isn’t really any magic formula for how often and when to post your content, consistency is the key. Posting weekly is good. Posting daily is even better. Your frequency will depend on how much time you have, how interesting your content is, how long it takes to create, and how interested your audience is.

Whatever sort of schedule and frequency you decide on, having a social media content calendar is a great idea to help keep you on track and have your topics planned out in advance. To save yourself some time, consider using Meta Business Suite to schedule out your Facebook and Instagram posts in advance. This way, you don’t have to worry about remembering to post each day. 

With your calendar managed, you can create your content ahead of time and schedule the content to post automatically at the date and time you choose. If you’re looking to schedule out content on platforms other than Instagram and Facebook, consider looking into other apps for scheduling, such as Buffer, SocialPilot, or Hubspot.

Knowing how successful your social media marketing efforts are is important. Even though social media platforms are free, for your dental clinic, social media marketing can drain both time and money if it is not being managed effectively.

There are dozens of measurable metrics available through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other channels you may be using. You should be tracking at least these two factors — reach and engagement.

Reach

Reach is simply the number of people viewing your content. It can be divided into three types.

• Organic reach is the number of people who saw your post in their feed as a result of following or liking your social account. This is your strongest audience segment since they have indicated that they are interested in your content.
• Viral reach tracks how many people have seen your content indirectly due to social sharing. They may not be following you, but their friends and/or families are. That means they are just one step away from becoming followers if they like what they see.
• Paid reach is the number of people who saw your content through promoted dental social media posts or ads. This type of reach is the most expensive and least engaged segment of your overall audience. Most of these people are strangers to your dental practice, but the more of them you can convert to followers, the more you recoup your social media marketing costs.

Engagement

Your engagement statistics let you know if the content you are creating is hitting the mark. Low levels of engagement will mean you will begin to lose your audience (if you haven’t done so already). Keep a close eye on the number of likes and shares you have for different types of posts. Use that information to help you decide what content is most successful and what kinds of content can be trimmed from your social media calendar.

Social media marketing is often, managed in-house by dental teams. It just takes efficient planning and an organized process to be successful. Some teams are new to social media or just don’t have the time, so they hire a social media marketing agency. Here are some questions to ask before you hire someone.

How do you create social media content for my dental office?

Some social media marketing companies bring a photographer to your practice to capture hundreds of images over a few days. These pictures can then be used throughout the year. This can be a valuable resource (not using stock photos is always great), but it’s only one part of a successful social media strategy.

Good visual assets need to be paired with relevant and targeted written content developed to reach  specific potential patients. A good social media marketing agency will provide you with different types of assets created to provide the most impact and expand your clinic’s reach.

Can you coach my team on how to capture content?

You don’t want to surprise patients when they see their image on your social page, so your team must know the rules of patient engagement and written permission to use their images online. A good social media coach will teach one or two of your team members how and when to engage patients in something fun and social.

Can you help me develop a content calendar?

If you dread social media because you struggle to develop new ideas each day, a social media marketing company for dentists can help create a quarterly content calendar that provides inspiration, ideas, and templates for each day’s posts.

If you feel a bit overwhelmed by the idea of producing content regularly and distributing it like clockwork, no worries. Find yourself a good dental social media marketing agency to help out. 

Golden Proportions Marketing has a team of highly knowledgeable experts, all dedicated to improving   social media marketing for dentists. We are ready to build your audience, generate engagement, and deliver results. Contact us when you’re ready to get started!