If you’re looking for a way to take your dentistry business to the next level, look no further than social media.
Want new clients? Platforms like Instagram and Facebook can help you find them.
Looking to retain the clients you already have and establish even better relationships with them? Yes, social media can help!
Want to know what’s being said about your business and deal quickly with both positive and negative feedback? Nothing is easier on social media.
To get you started, let’s take a look at the most important reasons you should be using social media for your dentistry business, as well as some more specific tips for making the most of your profiles!
1. Social Media Helps You Establish Better Relationships with Your Current Clients
Let’s face it: sitting in a dentist’s chair isn’t the first place most people think of spending a leisurely afternoon. But the fact of the matter is, the work you do is necessary for everyone’s oral and overall health. So, whether they like it or not, your clients will need to darken your doorstep sooner rather than later.
Fortunately, social media can help ease the hesitancy or trepidation that might be holding clients back from booking an appointment with you. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are great ways for your clients to see the people taking care of their teeth; in fact, studies have shown that people are more likely to make a purchase because of social media, as seen in the chart below.
Another factor that will keep your clients coming back year after year is the fact that social media is an excellent conduit for communication. More than one third of Instagram users have used the platform to make a purchase, so opening up your DMs is a great way to make sure those lines of communication are easily accessible for clients so they can easily schedule an appointment with you. Patients can contact you easily through your social media profiles, and receive prompt and helpful responses without even calling you!
3 Tips for Building Relationships with Clients on Social Media
- Facebook and Instagram are probably the best social media platforms for you to utilize. They give you the opportunity to post videos and pictures of you and your team, really giving a human identity to your practice.
- You can use your social media platforms to host contests and giveaways, which in turn will encourage clients to follow your profiles. Once your current clients follow you, they won’t be able to avoid being charmed by your stunning social media presence!
- Social media is a great place to provide value to your current clients in the form of knowledge. This can mean sharing useful tips and tricks for keeping teeth healthy, avoiding Turkey teeth (which is basically dental crowns gone wrong) or any other dental-related topics that your clients would find interesting.
2. Social Media Attracts New Clients
If keeping your current clients happy is your number one priority, bringing in new ones is probably your second! Fortunately, social media can help with this too, as it functions as both an organic and paid advertising platform.
What does this mean? Well, the act of simply posting on social media is a form of organic advertising; using hashtags or creating a more complex social media marketing strategy takes that organic even further as they broaden the scope of who will see the content you post.
Alternately, using social media platforms as paid advertising avenues means that your business is getting in front of people through strategically placed ads that you pay for. These ads might appear on a target’s Facebook newsfeed, or in a promoted Instagram story or post. Either way, this form of paid marketing allows you to plan exactly which content you want to get in front of potential customers, and how you want them to see it.
With paid ads, you can also create campaigns that prompt those who click on them to enter information such as an email address. This provides you with viable leads that can then be contacted to set up an appointment or automatically join an email list.
3 Tips for Attracting New Clients on Social Media
- Facebook and Instagram have excellent ad-targeting abilities, which allow you to market yourself specifically to the demographics you want to reach.
- Including a branded hashtag specific to your practice will ensure new customers can find you across Facebook or Instagram, as all the posts related to that hashtag will be yours.
- To increase your organic visibility, utilize a solid engagement strategy. This involves interacting with other local businesses (outside dentistry, of course) using your social media profiles. You can either comment on or share these businesses’ posts, increasing the chance you will be seen by potential customers in your area.
3. Social Media Establishes You as a Leader in Dentistry
Social media is a great place to showcase all the amazing work you do. In turn, it helps clients understand that you are simply the best at your job, and proud of it! Frankly, accurate, enjoyable, and informative content is all you really need to establish yourself as an industry leader: posting on social media shows that you have a lot to share, as well as value to bring to customers’ lives.
This doesn’t mean you should use social media as a way to brag about your business. Instead, it should be seen as a way to position yourself above your competitors. For many modern consumers, evidence of an active, thoughtful social media presence might be convincing enough to lead them to choose your practice over another. This leads to increased trust with current and potential clients, which is certainly an important factor when it comes to who will be taking care of your teeth!
3 Tips for Better Establishing You as a Leader in Dentistry with Social Media
- Maintain a constant presence on social media by creating an overall calendar that tracks when and what you’ll post, when and what content you’ll share, who you’ll be engaging with, and which accounts you will follow. Planning your social media presence down to the very last hashtag is much more professional than posting every so often on a whim, and is attractive for current and potential clients.
- Sharing before and after pictures of the work you have done to improve your clients’ teeth (with their consent, of course) is a tangible way of proving your worth and the value you can bring to a new customer’s life. See below for an example!
- Create a social media advocacy program that requires staff members to comment on, like, and share the posts from your business accounts. This type of program easily widens your audience, and potential clients, as well as giving employees an opportunity to take pride in their work. It’s a win all around!
4. Social Media Makes Reputation Management Easier
Being online is a great way to know what exactly is being said about you and your business. With social media, you can put out any fires that may spring up, as well as reward those who speak well of you publicly.
Statistics show that current consumers value online reviews almost as much as those they might hear from friends or family members. Being active on social media allows you to stay on top of this feedback. In the case of negative comments or feedback, it is important to have a strategy for dealing with these in a professional and sensitive manner; no business is perfect, but clients want to see that you handle negative feedback in a sensible way. If this is done correctly, you may even win back those detractors!
3 Tips for Making Reputation Management Easier with Social Media
- Don’t be afraid to use social media to post positive reviews from patients. Potential or current clients will be encouraged by this feedback and it will cause them to be more likely to view you positively.
- Creating a detailed plan for dealing with negative comments or feedback on social media is one of the first things you need to do when establishing your presence. The benefits of using your profiles to be transparent and authentic with clients outweigh the risks, but it’s nevertheless important to be tactful in how you use them.
- Prove how important your patients are by responding promptly and appropriately to their social media comments and feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
You got this!
Using social media as a promotional tool doesn’t have to be difficult; as long as you keep the important information above in mind, you should be good to go. But, if you need any more help setting up, running your social media and strengthening your online presence to attract new customers, the social media professionals at TechWyse are here for you! Give us a shout and we’ll truly take your business to the top.
Click here for more blogs about digital marketing specifically for dentists!
Diana is a Content Specialist at TechWyse. She enjoys learning and writing about every single aspect of Digital Marketing. In her spare time you can find her reading, tending to her houseplants, and drinking matcha lattes!
