Social media is a medium that allows people to instantly share news, photos and/or information with anyone who ‘Likes’ (Facebook), ‘Follows’ (Twitter), or even ‘subscribes’ (YouTube) to that particular social media profile. The three I have mentioned are market leaders and between them have approximately 1.5bn unique users and visitors per month. These are not just individuals, they are businesses as well and if you get it right, it can transform your business.
Social media is something that all dental practices should be using. Not only does it allow you to deliver information quickly and freely about your practice, it also helps you engage with your patients and build a community, making you more visible in an increasingly competitive market.
Using social media successfully isn’t easy; it requires a lot of attention. It relies on you making sure that if there is something to be said, or something happening in your practice, that you say it at that moment – in real time.
This could be from new staff members joining your practice to real-time
testimonials/messages left by recent patients. These are all things that your
existing and potential patients want to know, and are interested in.
So why should you choose social media? Well, it is a fast way to spread information. It is called ‘viral marketing’ because if one person posts something, anyone who follows, likes, or subscribes to them can also see that
information and share it with anyone who follows, likes, or subscribes to them, spreading the information like a virus. There is no better example of this than the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ video of a little boy with his baby brother sitting on his lap. This video was posted on YouTube and then shared on Facebook. It has now been viewed approximately 7.5m times around the world, making it one of the most viewed videos ever on social media.
This is an example of the power of social media. It can take something that
seems relatively uninteresting and turn it into something that has the potential to become a worldwide phenomenon. Obviously, I’m not saying that if you post a video you’re going to acquire millions of patients, but the principle remains the same. Post the right video, photo, piece of information or offer and you will find people start sharing it and/or talking about it and as such, find that intrigue takes control and forces them to visit the place where the story originated.
Advertising is expensive, but if you utilise social media effectively, it can be all the advertising your practice needs. It is said that on average people check their Facebook and Twitter feeds 14 times per day each. The peak times for these checks are between 7-9am, 12-2pm and 7-9pm. Using certain
online social media management systems such as Hootsuite and Sprout, you can schedule tweets, or Facebook updates to be posted at these times maximising the potential exposure on any particular piece of information. These two programmes also allow you to schedule future posts, so you don’t
have to do it every day. You can simply pre-load information at the start of the week and not have to think about it again until they need to be ‘restocked’.
With programmes like Hootsuite and Sprout, you can pay for upgraded versions, which enable you to do more, but to be honest; the free versions give you more than enough to maximise your exposure to your patients and
the community. The free versions of these programs come with ‘Analytics’
which allows you to see the volume of traffic coming through each social media channel, whether or not this has resulted in a click through to your site, and where those clicks originate in terms of location.
So as you see, there are huge benefits to using social media and it can turn
your practice from a place that people know is there, to somewhere people
want to be.