You’re Doing It Wrong: Social Media Marketing For Dentists

Social media marketing can be a challenge, regardless of the industry. It can be time consuming, and when you’re already running a busy dental practice and leading your team, a thorough strategy may not be a top priority. But if you’re on social media, you need to be putting in a good effort in order to grow your presence and increase engagement.

Social Media Marketing for Your Dental Office

Social media marketing for your dental office includes creating engaging content, differentiating the content between platforms, and learning what your audience wants to see. If that sentence made you start hyperventilating, don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it looks! It will take some time and effort, though, but it’s worth it. It will keep you in front of your patients and your community, share your expertise, and increase your web presence.

Marketing Is Education

No longer is marketing solely sales. Social media marketing means creating educational content for your audience. Think about the posts you see as you scroll through Facebook or Twitter; they’re primarily sharing information on a topic, right? As a healthcare provider, you have a unique advantage to share an educated opinion on the latest dental news and procedures.

While blog posts are great and definitely still valuable — you’re reading this, after all — there’s another type of content that’s more engaging. Video has become the highest engaged content on social media, which means you need to be taking advantage of it. When a video is directly uploaded to Facebook (rather than sharing the YouTube link) it will autoplay in followers’ feeds.

Different Platforms Means Different Content

Not only do different platforms have different types of posts, but there are different ideal posts, as well. Whereas video is best for Facebook, Twitter thrives on hashtags, images, and conversation. Instagram is built to be a visual medium, and you’ll see users posting both images and video.

Instagram is a great place to share patient testimonials. These could be either short video testimonials or before and after photos with the patient’s review in the caption. Creating a story is a tangible way to advertise your work. 

On Facebook, you can share your blog posts and other newsworthy pieces in the dental industry. For example, when the study about flossing came out recently, that’s a great opportunity to write a blog post about the pros and cons of the study and why it’s still important to floss. Connecting with viral content is a great way to connect with your followers.

Use Pop Culture as Content

If you’re at a loss for content ideas, look ahead for any pop culture events. If there’s an awards show coming up, you can write about teeth whitening options for an upcoming special event. We recently used this technique when we wrote about what a fight can do to your teeth and timed the release for when there was a big UFC fight.

These pop culture events are a great way to boost engagement with your following, because people like when events or ideas are tied together, even if it’s from their dentist!

Take Advantage of Free Stock Photos

When sharing content on social media, don’t get stuck in thinking you can only share photos of your dental practice. Not only will you run out of diverse, quality photos quickly, but your feed will begin to look the same, as well.

If you’re starting patient testimonials, a picture of their before and after is a great option, or simply a quality photo of them post-dental work. As for blog posts, there are some great resources for free, like Unsplash or Pexels.

Create Shareable Content

Ultimately, whatever content you post needs to be shareable. This means engaging and interesting to your followers, which involves a lot of testing. In general, image- and video-driven content is popular, but what kind of content is the issue. By testing different types of content, you’ll be able to find the ideal set of dental-related content that your followers respond to.

This means blog posts, curated content from other websites, image-only posts (think memes or gifs), and videos. It can take some time to find this, so don’t get discouraged! In general, it can take about three months to begin seen results from a new strategy; slow and steady will lead to success.

Today, social media marketing isn’t just for the bloggers and news websites. Using social media helps keep you in front of your patients and your community, share your expertise, and increase your web presence. Any business, especially a dental office, can benefit from some well-planned social media marketing. What are you waiting for?

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