Social Media Marketing for Dentists

If you’re practice is not using social media to attract new dental patients, you’re missing out because approximately 247 million Americans used social media in 2019, and this year won’t be any different. Young people, old people, and everyone in between is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or some combination of them. At least dental office Facebook and Instagram pages are a must. Do not miss a huge opportunity to refer potential patients to your dental practice website.

What is everyone doing on social media?

Sure, they are using it to entertain themselves, catch up with family and friends, and meet new people, but they are also trying to connect with local businesses. Your Perfect Patient uses interesting snippets about implants or orthodontics, etc to send interested visitors from Facebook or Instagram to your website. With great website content and design many of the visitors will become new patients of your dental practice.

 

When local businesses are active on social media, consumers are more likely to buy from them. Why? It’s all about feeling close to the business – building a relationship with it. Having credibility, authority and validity. Branding too.

When people can build a relationship with a business, they trust it, and that makes them want to go back to the business over and over again. It also makes them want to refer their friends and family to those businesses, and what could be easier than linking to the business’s social media page?

If you’re like most dentists, you’ve probably dabbled in social media a bit and just didn’t see the worth in it. Not seeing the worth in social media marketing usually comes from not knowing how to use it effectively in dental marketing. For that reason, the following are some social media tips you can use to make social media effective in attracting new dental patients online.

Consistency Matters

You must be consistent with your presence on social media. When people come to browse your social media account, they don’t want to see the last post was from three months ago. They want to see that you post daily or at least every other day. This means you’re online and available to answer questions or provide support. It is also important to be consistent with the message about what you practice does. Posts that consistently encourage people to learn more about dental implants or orthodontics or whatever your dental practice specialty.

Does this mean you have to be online every single day all day? No, of course not. It means that you should check in a couple of times a day to see if anyone has commented on a post or messaged you along with posting anything new that you feel people would love to see from you. Not sure what to post that will attract new patients? Keep reading.

Use a Mix of Information, Entertainment, and Promotion

Promoting your dental practice every time you post on social media will turn people away quickly. It doesn’t serve their needs at all unless they are actively looking for a dentist. While you do want to attract those people, you also need to drive people who are not actively looking because, in time, they may turn to you. This is why you should not only publish promotional posts, but also informative and entertaining ones.

The informational ones should give people tips on how they can improve their oral health. Create attractive images to grab their attention, and then promote the information they need in the text portion of the post. Canva.com is a great resource for creating high-quality social media images, so play around with it to see what you can create.

Entertaining ones can be memes, videos, or images that will bring a smile to people’s faces. Your goal is to elicit a positive emotion that will make your pape memorable to them, so they will want to follow more of your posts.

This is an example of an entertaining post:

You may also want to look over the Facebook page Singing Dentist. He’s become a very popular dentist online with his parodies.

That’s not to say you have to hit it out of the park like the Singing Dentist, but take note in how he promotes himself.

 

Encourage Patients to Engage with the Page

Use offline tactics to drive online activity by inviting your patients to post on your page. It’s a great opportunity to show off your work while making patients feel good about their beautiful smiles.

You can also take pictures of their smiles (with their permission) and post them on your Facebook page. People love going online to see themselves, and many of them will share the post on their timeline. This showcases your work to their local family and friends, which can lead to referrals.

Go Live or Post Live Videos

People want to see what goes on behind the scenes. If you’re doing an interesting procedure, ask the patient if it would be possible to record it or go live on social media during it. This will interest people who want to see what the procedure is like and may be interested in having it. They will remember how open you were with it, which will encourage them to reach out to you when they are ready.

Be You

Show patients and prospective ones who you are as a person. Post pictures of yourself outside of the office, inside of the office, and post videos of you speaking to your followers personally. This will draw people to you because they will see how real you are and how much you really want to bring them into your world.

Remember, it’s all about getting people online to trust you enough to call you for an appointment. This is especially true for patients who may be fearful of visiting the dentist.

Put it All Together and Have Fun With It

Social media is supposed to be a smorgasbord of posts that inform and entertain people. Use the mixture of posts mentioned above, be consistent with your posts, encourage people to encourage with your page, and just be who you are to attract new patients using social media.

This may way outside of your comfort zone, but don’t let that stand in your way. As you’ve learned in the past, what is just beyond your comfort zone is success. That’s what you’re missing with your social media marketing. You’re missing the main element of social media – being social.

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