How to Use Social Media at Your Dental Practice

Having a user-friendly website for potential and current patients may be obvious at this point, but what deserves more attention is how to put social media to work at your dental practice. Like any aspect of your business, implementing social media requires a plan, as well as a commitment of resources, time and consistency of your message. When done properly, social media can be a powerful tool for your dental practice to connect with your target demographic. Here’s how to get started, no matter if you’re launching a new dental business or well-established in your dental practice.

How to participate

Simply put, the larger social media presence you have, the better search engine optimization (SEO) your dental practice will have. This can be as easy as encouraging current patients to like or follow your business on the respective channels with a sign at your reception desk or links to your pages on your website and email signatures. The key is to make sure your team is aware of the importance of building followers.

What to share

At its core, social media can be used to create awareness of the happenings at your dental practice. This could be a unique treatment you offer, new equipment you’ve invested in, implementation of teledentistry, lead-up to a relocation, or before-and-after photos of a patient success story. You could even share links to interesting topics or dental tips your following might be interested in. And following your state’s Dental Practice Act, you could have regular contests with giveaways for new patients. Above all, it’s important to focus on the quality of your posts rather than quantity to not only bring in new patients, but also strengthen the relationships you have with existing patients.

How to set a budget

Most dental practices should expect to spend between 3% and 5% of collections on a marketing campaign. This is especially important in areas where there is a low ratio of patients per dentist, as well as in practices that are limiting insurance plan participation. Make Google Adwords or Facebook ads a part of that plan to reach your target demographic. What’s more, when operating on cloud-based dental practice management software, social media plug-ins are part of the integration capabilities.

Where to find help

As part of your team of advisors, a full-service marketing agency will help you establish a campaign with a solid social media plan. This will help you not only know your patient demographics, but also how they found your dental practice in the first place as part of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be tracking. How much are you spending to acquire each new patient? Having a single point of contact can help you answer this question and more.

What’s next?

There’s no one way to scale a business. Contact the experts at Professional Transition Strategies to make sure your dental practice is operating on top of its game.