You know enough to take advantage of the popular social media platforms, and you know how effective these can be for your dental marketing – if potential patients see lots of activity and fresh, compelling content, that reflects very positively on your brand, and makes you stand out!
Unfortunately, just producing content to be viewed is not enough; you need your targets to engage, and to do that, you need to produce and plan content they’ll feel compelled to engage with!
So, how do you generate more clicks, shares, and comments? How do you turn these simple engagements into potential conversions? Let’s walk through these industry tips to help boost your dental practice’s social media interaction!
1. Re-Purpose Your Successful Content
Let’s say your favoured platforms to produce your content through are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Each of these platforms caters to a different demographic, calls for uniquely formatted content, and has to be approached in a way that will properly communicate your message to the right audience.
You wouldn’t post a long paragraph on Instagram with a bland graphic to accompany it – we know that Instagram is all about startling imagery and video content, so you need to work with what the audience will react to!
If you post an article that does well on Facebook, it’s a good idea to convert it into photo or video content to post to Instagram, or a list format to publish on LinkedIn. Make sure to select the content that has done well, providing reassurance it’ll do well again!
You can even republish your articles that have earned an optimal interaction rate, but make sure you aren’t re-publishing content that didn’t perform well on your social networks.
2. Schedule Your Content
This is a great way to stay organized, and remain consistent on all social media channels. Scheduling when your content will be published eliminates the stress of having to create, design, and publish on a regular basis – maintaining a regular presence on every social platform is important, but there are simpler ways to go about it!
If you have lots of great, relevant content to produce for your patients, you can get all the dirty work of writing, formatting, and designing out of the way all at once, and schedule your blogs and articles to go out at certain days and times. This is extremely effective if you have lots of small projects and tasks within the dental practice that regularly come up, and can’t always make the time for your regular posts.
One of the best ways to organize your content is with the utilization of a Google spreadsheet, where you can easily align your planned posts with what social media platforms you’ll be publishing to, what media you’ll be using, internal notes and comments, and the peak times to post to specific platforms. Anything you think will be relevant and helpful to your publishing should have its’ own detailed column.
Knowing the best times to post on each platform can also help to increase your social media engagement.
For example, research published by the Social Intelligence Report indicates that users engage the most with Facebook on Fridays and the least on Sundays. 17% of all comments occur on Fridays, and 16% of all shares on Facebook posts occur on Fridays as well.
3. Use More Visuals
Why? Visual content just performs better on social media!
Think photo contests for your existing and potential patients – have contests for the best smile, the whitest teeth, and the best braces transformation! Have a patient of the month and feature their photo, a caption contest, anything you think will help engage your target! Visuals can make your content marketing that much more effective.
4. Take Advantage of Social Media Monitoring Tools
How else are your dental professionals going to be able to gauge what’s resounding with your audience, and what isn’t?
These tools both monitor and listen to your social interactions, and what people are saying about your brand. You can then make adjustments to your marketing based on the information collected from this data.
A few tools with free programs include Google Alerts, TweetDeck, and Hootsuite.
5. Share Other Valuable and Relevant Content With Your Following
You’d think directing people to your content and your content alone would be the more sustainable option, but this simply isn’t true. If you share quality, relevant content about dental care and dental services with your following that can act as a genuine resource for them, this will build credibility for your dental practice, and confirm to your clients that they can trust the content you share with the world. They’ll know they can look to you for accurate information; this will help bring more traffic to your social media platforms, and strengthen the credibility of your own content!
6. Be As Active as Possible
Having accounts on all social media sites is one thing, but if you don’t use them regularly, they may as well not even exist!
When your potential patients visit your page and see a general lack of any photos, status updates, blogs or any post type, they could assume you aren’t a credible option or be turned off. Make sure you’re posting enough for potential clients to see a reassuring amount of recent activity, not only to say ‘hey I’m here!’ but to increase your chances of being recognized and engaged with.
7. Pay to Play (If Necessary)
Sometimes your content will need a boost, and that’s okay – we all need a little help sometimes! Before you dive into your marketing budget, however, you’ll want to ask yourself a few questions, such as; is this worth boosting? Is this the piece that will perform well with a little help?
Once you’re factoring money into the scenario, you’ll want to be absolutely certain this has the potential to be a successful piece of content!
If you’re going to boost or promote your content, you’ll want to take advantage of the increased amount of traffic with a prominent, clear CTA. We’re already targeting our prospects with sponsored content, we may as well try to generate qualified leads while we’re at it!
Facebook has a convenient blue “boost” button that can be used to micro-target your prospects based on age, gender, etc. You can edit the targeted audience to fit your exact criteria, and with the click of a button, your content will be available to your potential leads!
Instagram also provides an option to promote your content. Before it begins to micro-target your desired prospects, the platform will ask what you’re looking to promote – are you looking for an increased amount of profile visits, more web traffic, or more promotion views? You’ll select your options from the menu before moving forward.
Twitter will also let you promote your tweets by selecting the ‘view activity’ button at the bottom of your post, followed by ‘promote your tweet’. Twitter allows you to choose a nationwide, statewide, or citywide boost for your content; the only catch is that you have to spend at least $50 before your content will be promoted, so it’s up to you to decide if this will correspond with your marketing budget and goals!
8. Be Cautious of Robotic Posting
Yes, producing a lot of content is great, and maintaining a strong presence online is preferable. This is why so many companies turn to robotic posting to ensure their message is circulating on a frequent basis – however, this is really only useful if you’re keeping your content fresh, which is hard to do with robotic posting.
We talked about the importance of being meticulous and choosy when re-purposing your content, and this same rule applies here. Many companies create one or two pieces of content and pay a fee to have them automatically posted – my advice would be not to go down this path.
Content is about making connections with and relating to your prospects, and if you’re continuously posting the same information without innovating your message or approach, your prospects will be losing interest. People like to relate to people, and they can tell the difference between robotic information being periodically thrown at them, and new, fresh content with a human voice, that tells them a new story every time.
9. Use the Right Social Media Platform: “All of Them” is Not the Right Choice
Each social media platform is favoured by a different demographic, has different functions, and asks for different content. When choosing and executing a social media strategy, you’ll want to be mindful of this, and utilize the platform that will help you generate the most interactions with your content.
If your goal is to increase your online advertising, Facebook would be the way to go. Facebook is expected to outpace all print ads as soon as 2019 – this is just a few short months away!
In addition to this, Facebook allows you to look deeper into your customer personas, and target very specific demographics so you know your content is going to the right place. This is certainly preferable to print ads, which tend to be sent to a wide variety of people, with only a finite number of them qualified potential leads for your practice.
Facebook is largely used by family and friends, making it an essential practice to build trusting relationships on this platform with honest advertising. You can share photos of your team or some of your favourite or most loyal clients during their check-ups. To gain more organic interactions you can provide updates on your practice, and request that your customers give their input, or make their own suggestions. The options are endless! As a dental practice, you’re looking to alleviate patient anxiety about their regular visits, so your content should be warm, inviting, trustworthy, and stray far from being sterile.
If you’re a cosmetic dental practice, Instagram is a great place to demonstrate the confidence-boosting element of what you do for your patients. Before and after photos are extremely effective, and this is the perfect platform for that kind of message, that only a photo can properly convey! Instagram also provides a great opportunity to use branded hashtags on all of your content, which will draw interested prospects to your page!
All in all, make sure you’re doing your research to keep up with changing industry trends and try any or all of these methods to boost the number of prospects engaging with your content.
Don’t forget to let us know what worked for you!
