If you don’t know how to use Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Instagram to build your brand and ultimately drive more high-value procedures to your practice then we need to talk.  The following describes our unique approach to developing successful social media campaigns for dentists. Remember our initial consultation is FREE and our advice will also assist your other online strategies like SEO.

The first step is to conduct a social media audit for your dental practice. The reason for this is that social media profiles can be created a different times, have multiple owners and fall into disrepair, so we need to establish the lay of the land for your dental practice.  A social media audit is the quickest way to get things back on track.

What does Deseo do with a social media audit for your dental practice?

• Examine your social media profiles
• Locate and document all your social media profiles, official and unofficial
• Check for completion of all details on these profiles and for consistency in imagery and message
• Follow up on your goals and compare performance today to performance one and two years ago
• Examine those who do it well
• Find the niche dental influencers and examine how they manage their brand on social media
• Observe imagery and branding on each of their profiles
• Measure key metrics like followers and engagement
• Make an action plan for improvements and goals for your profiles

Step 1: Locate all your dental social media profiles

First things first, where are you online? Go and find then write down each of the details for the Big and record them:

Step 2: Create objectives for your dental social media

Next you need to understand your dental practices’ objectives for each channel. Ask yourself the following questions and if you are unsure, just state that. Some questions that might be helpful are:

• “Why are we using this social account?”
• “Why do we want to use it?”
• “What are our goals for this social media platform?”
• “Are our potential patients in my markets using it?”

Step 3: Assess your current social media landscape

After you have found all your social profiles, we are in a position to review them all and give them a thorough once over. The starting point is always from a hygiene perspective. We start by checking to see that the profiles have been completely filled out. Social networks offer a lot of customization these days, so it’s easy to miss a spot.

• Are you using all three image locations on Twitter?
• Do you have both types of logos uploaded to LinkedIn?

Once we have completed this and understand your objectives we will now be in a position to devise a social media strategy that is in line with the objectives for your practice and one that ultimately drives more high-value procedures.

Once Deseo has audited your dental practice’s social landscape, we can now establish your objectives. Your objectives could be to drive a certain amount of traffic for a particular treatment. Or increase the number of followers by a percentage over a period of time. Or just to extend your dental brand’s presence socially in your city. Whatever they are, we will help you establish a content strategy to effectively achieve them.

The key to an effective dental social strategy lies not only in establishing your own objectives but equally considering the goals of your audience. What are their needs from each channel? How can you raise awareness of your brand in their channels by adding value without being intrusive? You will get much further with social media marketing if you offer something of value. There no strategic thinking in simply promoting your dental practice all of the time hoping it will attract new patients, with no added value. This simply doesn’t work well with social media.

Once you have given potential patients something of value around your treatments, you are then starting to earn the right to promote yourself a little. Our advice is to devote 80% dental social media output into providing valuable content and the other 20% promoting your brand. This approach will ensure you build more influence and trust with the value you provide your followers.