In the next blog in our series about social media, Gemma Starkey, aka Miss Social, suggests ways to make the life of your practice social media officer much easier.
Let’s face it, social media is a lot of effort and increasingly so. So, if you can get an idea about what works and what your goals are you can then create a format that you can use successfully on social media. And so, if you can find a format that works, for example, taking a question that’s been posed by a patient and having the dentist record a chatty, informal video to respond to it, that is something that you can rinse and repeat for lots of different dental problems. This makes life a lot easier, and as you get better at doing this, you’ll see what’s working and what’s not, so you can tweak and improve performance. Also, this is something your patients will come back to for advice because they know they can trust you. It’s a way to establish your channel as a trusted source of information.
Social media is ever evolving. An interesting thing I have seen is that you are now able to pull through all the social media sites to appear on your Google listing. Not many people are talking about this yet so I’m working with my practices to get in there to do it quickly. There was a time when you had to wait for Google to connect the dots, but now you can go on and put in those links yourself.
Something even more interesting is, as people are researching more treatments on social media and using that as their source of information, Google is now pulling videos from social media into the Google feed, which links to social media. For SEO, this is a lot more important than it’s ever been.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) scares some people and can make life a bit more complicated for your social media colleague than just uploading content, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. However, if they’re involved in doing that, then having some training on the little tweaks that they can make to improve searchability is beneficial.
Finding the right person
If your practice is new to social media, or wants to make more of the accounts you have, it’s important you choose the right person to be responsible for this. A mistake some practices make is to give the role to the youngest person in the practice. The attitude is ‘You’re young, you know about TikTok’ and it doesn’t really work. And it can be quite dangerous as you are putting somebody in charge of your online reputation who may not have a deeper knowledge of what the practice is all about.
While you still want to go ahead and do that, it’s important to be careful that you are vetting what they are doing and that you have a set of rules and guidelines in place for them to follow. A common mistake related to this is where responsibility for social media is given to someone who’s good at filming the videos for social media but it’s very dental-related. So, while the content might perform quite well, it’s being viewed by other dental professionals rather than patients. So, always be mindful of who you want to view your content.
So, in terms of finding somebody to look after social media, it’s worth training one person if they have a flair for it, but training them not just on social media, but also on business and marketing principles. For the dental practice, it’s important to make sure that your vision is clear. Understand your branding. Do you want to focus on cosmetic dentistry? Is your aim to be the local village dentist, a family dentist? Do you want people to view you as advanced or helpful? Remember, you can’t lie online about what your practice personality is. It does come out and people can see this in the reviews. So, it’s not right to say that you’re a high-end cosmetic practice when really your main focus is being a family practice offering predominantly general dentistry.
The person who takes on the role will need to understand all of this. However, while you might want to assign responsibility for overseeing the social media to one person, it should be a team effort. That would see multiple people coming up with ideas, so everyone’s a part of it. You can try different ideas and give responsibility for them to a few different team members. So, in the early stages, you can set those foundations, and you can agree how you want to portray yourself on social media and create a system. In dentistry, we love systems, and we have them for everything. So, create your social media system so that multiple people can then go in and follow it and just review what’s working.
Social media trends
People ask me whether it’s worth jumping on to social media trends. I feel sometimes they can get a bit carried away and invest a lot of their time and effort in the trends, without getting any return. So, trends can be enjoyable to do, but only as part of a variety of content. It should be an additional thing that you do to have fun, to keep the team engaged, to experiment a bit with what’s working, but it shouldn’t be the main focus.
This is especially the case if you are a practice that’s still finding its feet with what to post on social media. If you are a leader in social media, then it’s different. Then go for the trends, follow the trends, set the trends! But for most dentists and dental practices, sometimes it’s best not to worry too much about the trends and focus on good quality and engaging content.
If your initial venture into social media works out well for you, then you may want to consider calling in people who are more expert at it to help you improve. Hopefully, after you’ve experimented a bit, the team will have gained some experience of filming videos, and will have a better idea of the ins and outs of social media. That should cut down your spend on those experts because you’ve already trialled a few things yourself.
