NP Marketing is a digital marketing agency that specializes in dental marketing. We’ve been working with dentists, general dentists and specialists, for the past few of years, helping them attract new patients and retain current patients using online marketing.
As usual in our blog, we talk about relevant dental marketing topics. In today’s blog, we will be giving you three solid recommendations on how to brand your practice using social media.
First Tip: Post Frequency
The first thing to note is the frequency of posting. Before you start using social media to brand your dental practice, you need to think about the frequency of posting. You need to commit to a frequency of posting that is realistic for your dental practice and you need to be consistent. The key to success here is consistency all along. Like anything else in life, you need to be consistent with social media to be able to see results.
So, the one recommendation that we have for dental practices is that you keep a frequency of about two to three posts a week. Now, for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to be mainly talking about Facebook and Instagram as your mainstream social media channels.
Now, some dental practices might be using Snapchat, even Pinterest or LinkedIn. But as I said, today we’re going to be discussing Facebook and Instagram.
In terms of Facebook, you have to remember that on Facebook, unlike on Instagram, you can share links. So you could go ahead and share any kind of articles, blog posts, or even YouTube videos on your Facebook page. Whereas on Instagram, you’re a bit more limited. You cannot share any kind of link on Instagram (except for the one link that is on your bio).
An example of an article you could share on Facebook is an article from the American Dental Association or the American Association of oral and maxillofacial surgeons- just make sure your articles are coming from high-quality sources.
As a side note, if you’re doing any kind of blogging on your website as a dental practice, good for you! That’s a bonus, and it’s going to really help with your SEO. You also need to make sure that you’re publishing your blog posts using your Facebook account so that you’re reaching many more people through Facebook. This way you are driving traffic back to your website using Facebook.
In terms of Instagram, we want to keep that frequency of about two to three times a week for images on Instagram. However, on Instagram, what I would really like to emphasize are Instastories. Instastories are a big thing right now. You are going to get a lot of engagement if you use Instastories. What an Instastory is, is basically a vertical post normally that you could take with your mobile phone. Anyone on your team could take a photo, and it will live on Instagram for 24 hours. For this reason, you could actually increase your frequency. If you want to post daily, you could go ahead and do daily Instastories posts, and you want to keep to the two to three posts on your regular organic Instagram posts. But as I said, you could increase your frequency on Instastories, and in fact, I’d recommend it. There’s a lot of engagement going on in Instastories, and you see them on the top of your feed. So, go ahead and get some behind the scene images, get some team photos whenever you have a birthday, that’s where those kinds of posts should live on, your Instastories.
Second Tip: Dental Content
Our second tip is all about visual imagery and content. Now, I want you to go ahead and check out our Dentists Get Social Platform that we have created just for you. It’s a turnkey social media solution for dental practices where on a monthly basis you receive both images, dental styled images, and captions that you can use on your social media channels and not have to worry about content. https://npdigitalmarketing.com/get-social/
However, my recommendation with Dentists Gets Social is that you sprinkle in some photos of your own clinic during the month. What I would recommend is that once you get your images on the first of them month, that you schedule them using a social media planning software to schedule social media images. There’s many out there. Some of the ones that are mostly known are HootSuite, Buffer, Iconosquare, etc. There’s so many software programs, but you could decide on one particular software where you’re going to go on, and you’re going to schedule your images that you will get from Dentists Get Social. In between each image, you’re going to be using your own in-clinic photos of the team, of your patients, of reviews, of many other things, but we want to make sure that you have a complete calendar, and that you’re keeping the consistency.
Third Tip: Be Interactive!
Third and last tip that we have for you is that we want you to be interactive with your patients or prospective patients out there using social media. A great way to do this is by using Facebook Live video sessions. And for dental practices, in particular, you could do a Q and A session on a treatment. What I would recommend is that you select the top questions that you get from your patients about any treatment. It could be anything from dental implants to Invisalign to hygiene or anything else that you really want to talk about. You take those top questions and go ahead and host a Facebook Live video where you answer these questions.
It will be even better if it becomes a recurring video session! So, maybe once a month or once every two weeks, you could host a Facebook Live video. You’re going to go ahead and you can cover some basic facts about the treatment and then go into some of those FAQs. Once you’re done with your Facebook Live video, a couple of recommendations that I would give is that you share it on your Facebook page, and then you’re going to boost that video so that you can really increase the reach of that Facebook Live video to many more patients. And in a future blog, we’re going to be talking about targeting, Facebook ads targeting, and how to use custom audiences. But for now, you’re going to be boosting that Facebook Live right after you’re done. You are going to get many more views after that live video is done
The second thing that I recommend you do is that you download the video, and you could do two things with that video that you now have: you could upload it on your YouTube channel or you can also upload it to a blog post, and you could embed it within a blog post to go in depth in terms of those FAQs that you just covered on that Facebook live video.
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So there you have it! Three recommendations on how to brand your practice using social media. Just to recap, number one is that you want to select a frequency for your posting. You want to make sure that you’re consistent, and you want to make sure that it is realistic and that you could stick to that frequency throughout every week.
Second, you want to make sure that you’ve thought about your content and the visual imagery, and we have a tool for you to use called Dentists Get Social.
Finally, the third recommendation is that we want you to be interactive with your patients and prospective patients, and we want you to use Facebook Live video to host Q and A’s sessions on different treatments.
