Social media has become an important part of marketing plans in the twenty-first century. Two decades into the social media experience, we’ve come to use it for everything from sharing life’s milestones to researching the people we do business with. The tech savvy among us are even using it for advertising our products and services.
If you’re new to the world of marketing on social media for dentists and practices, you may be looking for help in creating social media marketing strategies for dentists. How can sites that are seemingly devoted to family pictures and posts about the endless deluge of daily holidays increase your client base? How can it make potential patients feel more inclined to choose your practice over that of the competition? It’s all in how you use it.
How Dental Social Media Posts Attract New Clients
While the vast majority of patients who are looking for a new dentist first consult their favorite search engines, a great deal of them turn to social media to make their final decisions. If you don’t have a solid social media presence on some of the more popular platforms, you may be missing a great chance to convert those practice seekers into patients of your own.
When we see pages and profiles on social media for dentists, we know they are keeping up with the times. A dentist who keeps up with technology is one we can trust to keep up with the most recent advances in dentistry. If we have shared connections with that dentist, we’ve got great reason to choose them over another practice. But with all the sites out there, how do we decide which ones to utilize, and how do we know what to post?
Advertising on Social Media for Dentists
When it comes to advertising, not all social media platforms are created equal. Some are more tailored to sharing news and jokes, while others exist solely to share pictures or videos. If you’re looking for the best way to utilize social media for dentists, you’ll want to consider the demographics you want to target, as well as the type of content you want to create and how often you want to post it. Before we get into the popular platforms for dentists, let’s look at identifying your audience and creating content.
Choosing Your Target Audience
Many dentists’ first inclination is to target everyone with their marketing campaigns since everyone needs to see the dentist from time to time. While that’s a fair assessment, it’s not a realistic target audience for a social media campaign. Creating an effective campaign in social media marketing for dentists requires that you narrow it down.
Focusing on middle aged professionals vs retirees with expansive dental needs will require different sets of keywords and phrases if you want to get your messaging in front of your target audience. Deciding on what kind of audience you want to target makes it much easier to create engaging content. It also makes it easier to choose the right platform for you.
If you’re targeting baby boomers, TikTok is not going to be your best option. Furthermore, using TikTok will require you to create video content, which can be tough in medical fields due to HIPAA laws and privacy concerns. Choosing your target audience is an essential first step.
Creating Content
In order to create engaging social media campaigns, you’ll need to create interesting content that can be shared. It’s easy to find a few interesting posts at the beginning, but you’ll soon learn that you need to get a little more creative when creating content that delivers results.
As we mentioned before, social media content for dentists can be tricky since we want to protect the privacy of our patients. If you’re a great photographer, maybe you’ll want to start there. If you have a knack for words, maybe articles or jokes are up your alley. Create great content, and you’ll get positive engagement on your posts.
Posting Content
Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to post it. If you’ve taken great pictures of a dental procedure your practice has just completed, you’ll want to create a social media consent form for dental office protection. Using a patient image without consent can land you in legal trouble, so make sure you’ve covered all the angles and gotten consent in writing before posting.
Which Social Media Platforms do Dentists Use?
The best social media platforms for dentists are those that allow them to personally connect with patients, establish connections through current patients, and share pictures of smiling patients and beautiful dental work. Choosing the right social media for dentists involves identifying your target audience, as well as the types of content you will be creating, and choosing the platforms that are the best match for your marketing plan.
Facebook is a tried and true platform that nearly every one of us has logged onto at one point or another. Social sites like Facebook are all about connecting with friends, and if you’re interested in connecting with twenty and thirty-somethings and baby boomers, Facebook is a great starting point in social media for dentists to focus their advertising dollars.
Make sure to ask your current patients to follow you on the platform. When a potential client sees that several of their friends or family are already following your practice on Facebook, it builds an instant connection with them. They no longer have to read reviews by people they don’t know, but they have personal connections who can provide trustworthy reviews.
One of the best platforms in social media for dentists who take a lot of original pictures is Instagram. It’s a social media platform that attracts hundreds of millions of people, due to the millions of high quality images and videos posted there each month. That said, if you want to gain any traction on Instagram, you’ll want to make sure you’re taking visually striking images and videos and avoiding stock imagery.
Instagram is particularly popular with millennials, so it’s a great way to attract twenty and thirty-somethings with families.
It’s one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, and can be used to create great marketing campaigns for all kinds of businesses. Twitter is well-suited to all types of content, from photos and videos to polls and special announcements.
However, the half-life on a Twitter post is much shorter than most other platforms. Make sure you are posting regularly if you want to make a successful marketing campaign on Twitter.
Unlike the other platforms on this list, LinkedIn is geared toward professional pursuits and business posts. We’re far less likely to share pictures of the beautiful meal we just prepared, and more likely to share an article describing cool new dental techniques making headlines. It’s a great way to get positive results from social media for dentists.
LinkedIn is the place to showcase your skills and education to professional Gen Xers with their fingers on the pulse of industry. If you’re creating content that showcases dental facts for social media, LinkedIn may be the place to showcase it.
TikTok
The hot new kid on the block, TikTok, has grown from a relatively unknown short form video platform to the fastest growing social media platform in the space of about six years.
TikTok is most popular with the under 20 crowd, so creating an engaging TikTok campaign can translate into young patients who may be with you for a lifetime. There’s no better way to give them a great impression of the dental industry than with a catchy video that makes going to the practice look fun and professional.
Social Media Management for Dentists
As great a tool as social media for dentists and practices can be in driving new business and converting new patients to long term clients. It won’t work to its full capacity if you don’t have the time to create content and post regularly. For this reason, many dental offices are turning to social media managers or management companies to run their marketing campaigns for them.
Hiring someone to keep on top of your campaigns can translate into customer attraction and retention through engaging content. They’ve got great social media ideas for dentists that you may never think of on your own. Don’t miss the boat.
Reach Out When You Need Help
Learning how to do social media marketing for dentists can be tricky since time constraints and patient privacy can create barriers to creating and posting content. Social media for dentists is an important enough marketing tool that if you aren’t able to create and manage marketing campaigns yourself, it’s worth getting help from the pros.
