How can a dentist use Instagram in 2018/19

When a marketer starts to promote their business, they need to identify the right channels to carry out marketing activities. If you are a practicing dentist, then you need to identify channels that will get you increased visibility. One such channel to promote your brand is through social media. Today, a large number of Canadians are using different social media platforms. So why not leverage this trend and promote your practice by using social media for dental clinics? But do keep in mind, when using social media for dental clinics, you need to ensure that you do not end up making mistakes as it can have an adverse effect on your online reputation. So to guide you on the right path, here are some best practices of social media for dental clinics.

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Choose the Right Channel

Not every dental clinic is the same. Some only provide dental restoration services while there are others that provide both cosmetic and restoration services. Similarly, not every social media platform is the same, some are good for sharing content while others are good to build connections. So before you simply start using social media, give a thought on which social media platform will be best suited for your dental practice.

To start this identification process, you need to ask a few questions. These include:

• What type of audience are you targeting? Where can you find them?
• What goals do you want to achieve using social media? Do you want to increase awareness or get leads?
• How can you achieve those goals? Which platform will be suitable to achieve them?

When you answer these questions, you will automatically start forming a solid strategy to start using social media. As for choosing the right social media for dental clinics, here are some factors to consider:

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• Google+: Google+ is a social media platform that is provided by Google. Compared to larger networking sites such as Facebook, the number of Google+ users are comparatively less. However, it does have a good feature of creating communities that you can use to bifurcate your followers and only share posts that are of interests to that community. For example, bifurcation of patients and other dental professionals into two different communities to share different content.

• Facebook: Facebook is extensively used in Canada with over 18 million active users. With such a large number of users, Facebook should be a part of your list. With the help of Facebook, you can highly engage your target audience as Facebook enables you to share different forms of content including videos. Also, Facebook is a good catalyst in directing traffic to your website through on-page buttons and other CTAs.

• Twitter: This social platform has limited word count but can easily accommodate the links to your website content. When your followers retweet your tweets, it ensures that your tweets reach out to a larger audience. The good thing about Twitter is that it enables you to creatively broadcast your blogs with catchy headlines and trending hashtags.

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the social media for professionals. If you plan to use it for your dental clinic, it will be helpful to share industry related news with other professionals who are related to your practice. This will show your expertise in your field and will help these professionals to direct patients towards you for expert opinion.

• Instagram: Instagram is a social media platform that is used by more visual brands that have products to display as it supports image and video-based content. However, you can use it for your dental clinic promotion by uploading dental infographics and dental procedure demo videos to ease patient anxieties.

Have a Pattern

Social media marketing is not a process that will happen organically. Like any other marketing technique, social media marketing also needs to be planned beforehand. So before you go ahead and start posting on the social platform, decide what pattern you want to follow. A pattern is the media type and content style that you wish to share with your audience. It is also the type of theme you want to set for your social media page. Some of the common types of style you can opt for include:

• Casual Content: If you are one of those light-hearted dentists who can find humor in work to ease your patient’s anxiety, you should try uploading casual content on your social media pages. These could include funny memes, GIFs, images and humorous videos about something you normally do.
  

(Some Fun Dentists)

• User-generated Content: Off-late the popularity of user-generated content has increased drastically. This is because people tend to trust a brand more when the consumers themselves have something to talk about it or for it. So encouraging your patients to share and post on your social media pages can go a long way in building trust among the masses.

• Company-related Content: Another way to engage your patients through social media is by uploading content about your employees and yourself. This could be like behind-the-scenes sneak-peek for your patients. You can upload images of how your clinic looks, employees working, festive celebrations, etc. Such type of content sharing helps patients to relate with you at a humane level.

• Engagement specific Content: Posting the same images and videos, again and again, will eventually make your patients disinterested. Every now and then you should try something different to engage them. The best form of engagement takes place when the patients will also get a chance to share something. So why not post quizzes, questions, and contests. These could be some simple questions to earn a 10 percent discount on their next dental visit.

• Visual Content: A well-written piece of content can also go unnoticed if there are no images to support it. Human beings have an inclination toward visual content. So use infographics, images, and videos more often for better engagement.

Consider Promoted Posts

Social media is a good place to gain organic followers, but as a business, you need to push a little harder to get a good count of followers. When you start off, the number of followers will not rise automatically because not many people will be aware of your business page. To solve this problem, you need to consider using promoted posts, paid posts or sponsored posts. These are just like any posts you put on your social media pages. However, you pay a certain amount to sponsor the post and get it promoted. This is necessary for almost all types of business. With the huge number of posts present already, promoting your posts will get it the much-needed visibility. This type of posting is possible on all major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Mind Your Language

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When businesses enter the social media marketing circle, there is one very important thing to keep in mind. Since the social media setup is a more casual set up, businesses feel that using overtly casual language and slangs will help them get followers. This is not true. Though social media is a casual set up, and you have freedom of speech, you need to be careful that you do not offend anyone. The biggest mistake business make is to try using trending slang to become a fad. Do not do so! As a dental clinic choosing to use over casual tone may not go down well with your patients who look up to you.

While you may feel that using over casual tone will connect with the audience, there is a major chance that it will put them off. This is because such language usage will make the patients feel that you are trying too hard. So make sure you understand the age group you will be addressing and accordingly use your language and vocabulary. Another thing to be mindful of is not hurting the sentiments of any specific person, religion, nation, in short anybody! Specifically when you are creating memes.

Track Your Competitors

While you are busy working on posting content on your social media pages, keep in mind that your competitors are also taking efforts to make their brand shine on social media. If somehow the competitor is able to post better content and get more followers, your efforts will go in vain. So to avoid this, make sure you keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Competitive analysis is what you need. Competitive analysis helps you understand what your competitor is up to and gives you a chance to improve your strategies. To find out such data, you can simply use competitor analysis tools like Fanpage Karma. Such type of tools provides you with data that include influencers in your business, trending focus areas in your business, competitor’s best performing content, etc. The good thing is that, such tools help you find popular hashtags, the total number of likes your competitor received, number of followers, new followers, etc.

Nurture Followers

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A successful social media strategy does not stop after reaching a good number of followers on your business page. You also need to keep those acquired followers engaged so that the followers continue to follow you. The very first step in nurturing your followers is to initiate an interaction with them. Like we mentioned earlier, social media audience engagement is possible when you ask questions or hold competitions. Make it a point to do these often. Doing so often will showcase your social media page as an active one and the followers will want to keep coming back for upcoming posts. Also, indulge in encouraging your followers to do things on your page. For example, you can create a post asking for the most preferred toothpaste and why.

Another important factor to keep in mind when nurturing your followers is to respond back on time. Social media is a two-way street. If you intend to post content on it, be ready for the comments you will receive. Receiving likes and comments on social media makes you happy. But as a dental clinic looking for business promotion, you need to go through every comment and ensure you revert back to them. This will encourage the users to comment frequently on your page.

Be Consistent

You decided to opt for social media marketing. You created social media pages. You posted good content and acquired a fair amount of followers. Now what? If you feel that you can simply stop creating good content and still have new followers or even the same number of followers, then you are mistaken. Social media is where people look for content and that too regularly, sometimes more than one time in a day. If you are not able to fulfill this need, be prepared to lose followers rather than gaining more. So if you want your followers to increase, keep posting good content on a regular basis.

Sometimes you might be busy with too many appointments in a day but do not let that affect your social media posting. To take charge of this task, you can use smart tools such as CoSchedule and Hootsuite. These tools can help you pre-schedule your social media posts in advance so that you do not have to worry about posting them every day. Once your social media marketing kicks off, this really comes in handy.

Social media is not as complicated as it may seem. Strategizing social media for dental clinics is just like managing your own social media page. Keeping this in mind, just post good content to keep your followers engaged and interested. If you need help in creating good content for your social media, reach out to social media experts in Edmonton.