Tips to Improve Your Social Media Presence

Social media presents dental practices with a potentially powerful marketing tool. With the right strategy and structure, you can develop a strong social media presence to stay engaged with current patients and generate new business.

However, optimizing your social media marketing can be a daunting prospect – socials are now far more complex and competitive than they used to be. So, we’ve put together these tips to help you navigate the social media maze and improve your social media presence.

Areas we’ll be looking at are:

• Setting your social media goals.
• Researching your audience.
• Increasing brand awareness.
• Understanding how social media platforms differ.
• Creating content.
• Measuring your social media marketing performance.

Set Realistic Social Media Goals

Improving your social media presence starts with setting your goals, which will define the rest of your strategies and how much time and effort you’ll need to dedicate to your social media marketing campaigns.

Being realistic with specific goals will give you a sense of purpose and an achievable social media blueprint with a firm foundation on which to build while avoiding the pitfall of posting random content aimlessly.

Aiming for attainable objectives will allow you to scale your social media marketing efforts in a way that’s affordable and less time-consuming.

Typical realistic social media goals for dentists include:

• Expanding your social media reach.
• Attracting more new patients.
• Improving community engagement.

Once you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to move on to the next stage in improving your social media presence.

Research Your Target Audience

You already know your main target audience – current and prospective patients – but you need to delve a little deeper to create a general patient profile – a representation of your patient base. Consider factor such as:

• Age range, gender, and background of your patients.
• Your patients’ aspirations, desires, aims, and concerns.

Many social media marketing campaigns falter because they don’t post content that connects with a defined audience.

Research your audience, understand the challenges they face, and which topics, products, or services they’re already interacting with on socials. This type of analysis can give you an insight into how to make your dental social media presence stand out from the crowd.

Once you’ve identified and researched your target audience, you can start using social media to reach it with relevant content and begin to develop your brand voice.

Increase Awareness of Your Brand Personality

Strengthening your brand awareness isn’t just a matter of getting the name of your practice out there.

Creating authentic, lasting brand awareness entails focusing on content that emphasizes your brand personality and values, as opposed to just sending out promotional messages. You can, for example, depict the human side of your brand by highlighting the people who comprise your dental team – maybe with photos or videos of staff interacting with patients.

Growing your brand’s audience also involves determining dental topics that people care about – monitor specific keywords, hashtags, and phrases relating to dentistry. Having a finger on the pulse of these dialogues should help your brand messaging reach your core audience faster.

Learn How Different Social Media Platforms Work

Improving your practice’s social media presence requires producing content that aligns with the purpose of different platforms.

Here’s a quick overview of how different top social media sites work:

• Facebook. The social platform of choice for most businesses, and with a strong emphasis on engagement via reviews, comments, shares, and messages.
• Twitter. Fast-paced platform with bite-size snippets and a limited character count – good for sharing links.
• Instagram. Focusing on photo- and video-sharing rather than words, which may allow you to target millennials.
• YouTube. Allows you to reach a wider audience by posting videos from your dental website and/or streaming new video content.
• LinkedIn. Designed for business professionals, so an ideal place to share dentistry-related content that may lead to new referrals.

Having an insight into how different social platforms work is crucial to enable you to create relevant content for the ones you want to target.

Create Relevant Content

You may not necessarily have to create entirely different content for each social platform, but you may need to modify it to avoid alienating your audience with information that holds little value for them.

As well as planning content that will engage with your audience on a specific social platform, you also need to bear in mind that your content needs to be relevant to your niche.

It should be self-evident but we’ll spell it out anyway – as a dentist, your social media content should focus primarily on dentistry. This can include sharing oral healthcare advice and dental-related facts, jokes, articles, blogs, and practice news.

Monitor Your Social Media Marketing Performance

You need to assess your social media performance in order to consolidate your presence on socials. Common social media metrics include:

• Number of followers: This tells you the potential size of your audience, but remember that most users only see a small amount of content from the profiles they follow.
• Social reach: This tells you how many people actually see your content – typically a small number of your followers. However, if you use paid advertising or get a large number of shares, your reach may significantly exceed the number of your followers.
• Engagement: This tells you how many users interact with your posts.

Advantages of Improving Your Social Media Presence

Small businesses like dental offices can reap more benefits from social media than large corporations with huge budgets. This is because the effectiveness of social media marketing depends on the level of engagement your posts generate, not on how many followers you have.

Dental practices tend to be community-focused, which makes it easier to connect with local people online. Many people turn to social media to ask for advice or recommendations on services and products. If your office has a strong social media presence, you’ll be part of these conversations too.

You can also use socials to help ease apprehension and concerns among people with dental anxiety. Dental social media marketing allows you to make your patients feel welcome and comfortable before they even walk into your practice.

Contact DentalROI if you’d like to know more about how to improve your social media presence.