Facebook pages can alienate your patients, damage your brand and even get you into trouble with the GDC.
It may sound surprising but having social media connected to your practice can be harmful, if managed incorrectly. Although such sites can provide unparalleled access to new and existing patients, they can also be damaging if not set up and maintained appropriately. Having a basic understanding of the fundamental steps and also the common mistakes is therefore essential.
Firstly, any form of social media will need some, not insignificant, degree of dedication to get right. If you have, or are intending to set up a social media account, then it is imperative that you have somebody who can spend enough time regularly updating and controlling your profiles.
Ideally they would be familiar with social media platforms and happy to represent your practice. You should also be able to trust them implicitly. After all, they could have the potential success and failure of the future of your business in their hands.
Before beginning your social media campaign it is worth considering which platforms you wish to use (as many as possible for the best results) and for the optimum impact and consistency these should all be set up simultaneously. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and so on are all able to tie in to each other nicely and the combination can really add some clout to your online presence.
When setting up your profiles it is important to ensure the branding and aesthetics remain consistent across all platforms. Your profile picture for all sites should remain the same; your practice logo would be the most obvious choice. Any colour scheme or themes should stay constant too; this will help to achieve a sense of cohesion between medias and increase the recognition and trust for your practice brand. Having set up your social media pages and profiles you are no doubt going to want to post some content. This is the important part. It’s the reason you set up the site in the first place and also one of the most potentially dangerous aspects of using social media. By getting this wrong you can isolate your practice, alienate your patients, and permanently damage the brand you’ve worked so hard to develop,
So how do you know what to post? The rule to follow is the 70-20-10 method adopted by Crystal Vilkaitis, social media director at SnapRetail. It breaks down as follows:
Seventy per cent of the content you post should add value to your site. Aimed towards building brand recognition, it should engage with your followers and friends. Maybe give a helpful tip, comment on local news and events, or ask questions to interact with your community. This is really about establishing a rapport with your patients, and can be as simple as posting: “It’s the weekend! What’s been the highlight of your week?”
Twenty per cent should be sharing other’s content, tagging other sites and promoting events. By doing so you will be extending your sphere of influence, thanking a company that you think has done a good job and connecting your audience with another business. This will again help to develop your levels of engagement and trust, and is also likely to be recognised and reciprocated.
The final 10 per cent should be promotional in nature. This is where most get it wrong. The majority of practices spend more time promoting themselves, much to their own detriment. Essentially this is tantamount to spamming your audience, forcing outright advertising onto your followers, with nothing else to offer. And why would they listen? What you need to do first is build up trust and engagement, so that when you do run a promotion or want to talk about the exceptional services you provide, it won’t just be ignored.
There are a couple of things to remember when posting to social media: Firstly always include a photo or image of some kind. Pictures can increase the levels of engagement by 1,000 per cent, 10 times more than any purely text based post.
Secondly avoid boring or repetitive content. If you’ve announced a promotion for a teeth whitening service you offer, don’t subsequently post, “We are still offering a great deal on teeth whitening”, later the same day. The important thing to remember is that social media is an exercise in community, and not everyone will want to be reminded of the same things constantly. There is a wealth of interesting and exciting things that you can post on social media sites, the more inventive and eye catching the better.
Finally, always remember that social media is a public forum and no personal or confidential information should be published without prior explicit consent. The GDC has released some very comprehensive guidelines on how to act on social media and it is important to follow this, to not run foul of the governing bodies or the public.
Ultimately social media sites, when managed competently can transform the image of your practice from a small dental surgery that people only interact with when they need to, to a vital and flourishing part of the community.