In the first of a series of blogs about the benefits of social media for dental practices, Gemma Starkey aka Miss Social, talks about how to get the best out of your use of Facebook.
Facebook is the most widely used platform on the planet so, it’s a great tool for dental practices to make their presence felt. Posts can be viewed by people from all over the world. However, your patients are likely to be people who live or work near where you’re located.
To narrow down your audience as well as posting on your practice’s account, you may want to consider joining Facebook groups local to where your practice is based. So, if you’re located in a village or a small town, then the sorts of groups to look out for are the ‘spotted in’ pages. Once you’ve been allowed to join, you can automatically schedule your Facebook posts to go onto those groups. Although not all groups will allow you to join as a business page, many of them will. I haven’t really run into any circumstances where that’s been an issue.
Facebook groups
Facebook groups can be great at catching the attention of people who live locally. We used them very successfully to publicise an Open Morning to attract new patients being held by one of the practices I work with. We posted about it in the local Facebook groups, and they really helped to bring people in on the day. We had 18 new patients sign up on the morning, and as we had waived the new patient sign up charge, they also signed up to the plan straight away. The good thing is, because they joined the plan, they’re likely to be long lasting patients. So, using the Facebook group really helped us achieve that.
While you may want to post on your practice’s account more frequently, I would advise keeping your group posts to a maximum of one a week. While each group is different and will have its own rules, some will only allow business posts on certain days, so be mindful of that.
Posts that are really aimed at the local community often go down well, especially if they aren’t obviously selling. For example, during the summer holidays, if you have an excess of toothpaste samples you could post something in your local group along the lines of ‘We have lots of these samples. If you’re going away on holiday, pop in and grab some for free.’ Also take a photo of the outside of your practice and post that so that people can see that it’s their local practice and can recognise it. With this sort of post you’re not direct selling, you are just being of service, as social media isn’t about direct selling, it’s about fostering a community and improving relationships.
What does good look like?
Apart from the example above, what makes a good Facebook post? A good post would be branded to the practice, and it would have relatability. It’s also important for it to have a good hook. Nobody wants to go onto Facebook either to be sold to or to be preached at about needing to brush their teeth twice a day.
So, it’s about thinking about who you are as a dentist and what your interests are, and then putting that across in a way that your audience, namely patients on social media, will be able to relate to. So, creating a good post for Facebook would look more personal. Using either a photo or a video of yourself as a dentist, it would be short and concise, and it would have a more conversational, not preachy tone.
For example, the dentist could record a video where he or she talks about the oral health problems they’ve seen in surgery that day. That could be where a patient has come in, and they are experiencing sensitivity but it’s sweet sensitivity. So, they could sit there and talk about this in a very conversational way, a bit like an informal chat. It could go along the lines of “We had a patient come in today who had sensitivity. Now this sensitivity is not what you would usually expect, cold sensitivity. This was sweet sensitivity. Do you have a problem with sweet sensitivity? Here’s what you need to know about it.” They could then go into some detail about it but at the same time making sure to keep it light and conversational. Having a video or a photo of the dentist also makes it more intriguing.
Variety is essential
Varying the types of content you post is extremely important. I recently helped a practice with a post for International Friendship Day. We chose a day a few weeks in advance to shoot the content and we based it on one of the trending reels for Instagram, which can be cross posted to Facebook, which was based on the sitcom Friends credits. We used the Friends theme tune and opened with a picture of a dental chair, and then all the dental team fell into place like the Friends cast members do. This made it a perfect post for International Friendship Day.
Although that was not a post about teeth, it was about the dental team, which also helps to foster good community on your social media sites. With this, you’re bringing in the dental people and your patients who already follow you like to see posts that are more personal and bring a bit fun too, as well as being on trend. However, as well as these types of posts you need things like before and after photos so people can see what it is that you do. They might not always get a lot of engagement, but it’s still important to post them.
Experiment a bit so you can get an idea of what works and what your goals are, and then create a format that you can put out on social media. Let’s face it, social media is a lot of effort and increasingly so. So, find a format that works, such as taking a question a patient has asked and the dentist recording an answer to it, if you can find a fun or niche way to do that, then it is something you can rinse and repeat for lots of different problems. This makes life a lot easier, and as you get better and more experienced, you’ll see what works and what doesn’t. So, you can tweak and improve the performance, and your patients will come back to your account for advice because they know they can trust you as well. You can then be seen as a trusted source of information which helps foster good relationships with patients.
