Benefits of Social Media to Your Dental Practice
For many years, dentists relied almost exclusively on reputation, word of mouth, expensive advertising and flyer marketing to help build their practices. But, it’s a different time now and more likely than not, our patients/audience are on one or more social media platforms. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat,etc being active on social media will give us the ability to drive traffic, reach new patients and build lasting relationships that will only benefit our practices.
Some great benefits of Social Media to our practices are:
Increased Visibility
Social media allows for greater visibility, provides us the chance to reach a wide audience and create relationships with current and potential patients. Because of this increased visibility we are now able to spread information about our practices far and wide.
Reach & Interact with Potential Patients
One of the most important things about social media is that we are able to reach and connect with our audience. It’s a great place for them to see customer testimonials, experiences, friendly office images and the results of our work. Responding to questions through social media helps as well - our patients will like the fact that their doctor is accessible.
Strengthen Patient Relationship
Before now, patients needed to call the office and speak to the receptionist to schedule an appointment, ask questions or discuss a concern. Now that there’s social media, our patients have better access to us and our offices. They can send messages and get a quick response, and If our social media pages are less clinical, it will be easier for our audience to see us as relatable. The viral nature of social media also means it’s easy to spread information about you and your practice far and wide. By writing articles, posting videos and sharing information that demonstrates our expertise, we can begin to show our patients what we and our practice(s) are about. It is also a great tool to elicit responses by creating content that gets people to click, comment or share.
In my practice, we recently started to utilize Facebook, Instagram and we are working on snapchat filters (kids love this!). The results so far have been great! Our patients learn more about our practice, staff and doctor(s), and they are leaving us really great feedback which is helping to drive traffic to our website and ultimately our practice. If you’re not already, you should definitely consider utilizing social media in your practice - if done correctly will benefit your practice in the long run.
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