A Beginners Guild to Social Media Marketing for Dental Offices. Plus 10 Winning Social Media Content Ideas
Gone are the days when social media was only used as a place to connect with friends and family online.
Today millions of people access social media for the latest news, events, to learn something new, and to connect with the businesses they love.
If a dental office is on the fence about using social media to market its practice, now is a great time to jump in.
While traditional marketing techniques are still a valuable tool to attract new clients, social media marketing has evolved.
It now offers dental practices the unique ability to connect with new clients and to engage with existing clients on a personal level.
Targeting New Clients
There are several different social media platforms.
Each one hosts its own unique audience.
Determining which social media platform a dental office should use can be tricky.
You can’t just create content, post it across your social media channels, and then sit back and watch the content go viral and your followers grow into the millions.
There is a strategy to creating social media content that attracts new clients and engages them, so they stick around.
To get the most out of social media marketing, it’s first a good idea to have a good understanding of the unique audience that is on each platform.
Facebook:
- 25- to 34-year-olds accounted for 25.7 percent of Facebook users, although there is an influx of older generations as younger generations move to other platforms.
- Facebook stories and short videos drive the most engagement.
- Facebook users access the social platform almost exclusively via mobile devices
Instagram:
- Instagram has a predominantly female user base that’s under the age of 34.
- Instagram is a key part of any social marketing funnel for educating and nurturing customers.
- Stories, Carousels, and Reels should remain central to a marketer’s content strategy.
Twitter:
- Twitter's largest age group is 30-49 years old
- Twitter offers shorter-term interactions that signal it as a place to gather quick news or conduct customer service.
- Twitter is a place to discuss events and gather breaking news
- Retweets and creating tweet threads that educate or share industry news do the best on Twitter
LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn’s largest age group is 46-55 years old.
- LinkedIn hosts a primarily higher-educated, and higher-earning business-to-business audience.
- Over 70% of LinkedIn users live outside of North America
- LinkedIn is all about connecting. Engage with like-minded people (like your favourite dental supplier), and reshare relevant content. Long-form content (up to 2,000 characters) broken up into short paragraphs, multipage documents, and 1-minute videos tend to get the best engagement on LinkedIn
TikTok:
- TikTok is notably seeing growing use among adults 18-34
- Fun videos that educate, celebrate, or inform using trending audio do the best
- There has recently been a boom in influencer marketing
Creating Content That Attracts and Keeps Your Target Audience
If a dental office has never had any social media accounts, the best place to start building their followers is to let their patients know they have social media.
They can write their social handles on their patient information boards, include their social media handles in client emails, and tell their patients while they are in the office to follow them on social media for office updates and information.
Another great way to build a following on social media is to follow and engage with other similar accounts.
Dental offices can follow and engage with their staff, dental publications, and dental suppliers across social media.
After a dental office starts building a solid following, it’s time to concentrate on creating engaging content.
Take advantage of current trends to grow brand recognition.
One of the biggest trends to come from 2022 are short Reels that use trending audio in creative ways.
There is no need for high-value production equipment.
Keep it reel in your Reels.
No matter what type of content you post, the most important thing is to create content that is authentic.
Audiences want to see relatable content that educates, entertains and engages and is real (real people over stock photos)
10 Social Media Content Ideas for Dental Offices:
- Patient education videos - proper flossing and brushing techniques, myth vs fact videos, etc.
- Meet the dental team content
- Positive patient reviews
- New promotions or services offered
- Holiday content
- Celebration content – staff birthdays, office anniversaries, etc.
- Call to action content – content that has the viewer complete an action like answering a question or taking part in a poll
- Community and volunteer events
- Office updates – hours and safety procedures
- Entertaining or humous content – dental jokes, ‘caption this’ photos, anything that allows you to show personality while being professional.
- Before and after photos of patient procedures
Timing the posting of content is also important.
Dental offices will have better results with their social media marketing plan if they are posting almost daily regularly.
Regular daily posting is important to rank well in each platform’s unique search algorithms, crank up the volume on brand recognition, and enhance brand loyalty.
Social media marketing can be deceiving.
Achieving positive results is very time-consuming and requires significant strategy.
If it’s too time-consuming for a dental office to keep a regular posting schedule, concentrate on one or two platforms that target the audience you want to reach.
Some platforms integrate well with each other, which makes it easy to cross-post across platforms.
If a dental clinic is trying to reach out to younger clients, they could make educational TikTok videos on dental hygiene, and share those videos across Facebook and Instagram Stories.
To reach a slightly older audience, a dental office could post personal and educational photos and videos across their Facebook and Instagram feeds simultaneously.
To connect with associations, potential team members, or their favourite dental supply company, a dental office could do so on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Tracking Social Media Marketing Progress
Tracking social media engagement is a crucial step that helps dental offices see the progress of their social media marketing, and areas they can improve on.
After all, social media without engagement is just media.
And an important step in taking social media content from just media to engaging content that attracts new clients and builds client relationships is to track engagement.
Tracking engagement is a wonderful way to see what type of posts an audience is engaging with, when audiences are online and to track new followers.
You can use third-party applications for this, but every social media platform has its own analytic tools.
Using a platform's analytic tools is more convenient and works well enough when monitoring small to mid-size social media accounts.
It will usually take around a month to get a good idea of what content is working or not working.
While you will have decreases in your analytics occasionally, the overall movement in your analytics should be positive.
If there are more decreases in followers and engagement than increases, then it’s time to tweak your approach or content.
To Sum it Up
Social media has evolved from a platform where people went to build connections with only other people to a platform where businesses, like dental offices, can reach new clients and build meaningful client relationships. If dental offices are strategic with their social media marketing strategy; targeting audiences by platform, posting content that fits well with the audience on the platform, and tracking their progress to see what is and isn’t working, they can connect with new clients and grow meaningful online relationships. While creating a winning social media strategy can help a dental office reach new clients and foster online relationships with current clients, it takes a good chunk of time and effort. If it’s too much right now, it’s a good idea for a dental practice to just pick one of two platforms to promote across according to the platform's target audience.
