5 Timely Social Media Updates You Need To Know

Social media is changing all the time. While not every change is relevant for dental practices, you can count on us to bring you the most important tips and updates. Here you go!

 

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups now have the option to allow Facebook Business Pages to join their groups. Yay! This is an awesome opportunity for dental practices to network and build relationships with people in their neighborhoods.

Take a look at this image. This is a post someone made asking her neighborhood community which orthodontic practice she should choose for her daughter’s treatment. This screenshot was taken just two hours after the question was posted – at that point 59 people had already commented on the post. Approximately one week later, the post comments grew to 124.

If these ortho practices were active in this neighborhood Group, they could comment on the post themselves and invite the prospective patient to visit their practice and meet them. The practice could also like and thank all of the patients that were complimenting and recommending them. The practice might even take their efforts offline and send those patients a little coffee gift card or thank you note for the kind shoutout in the Group.

Not in your neighborhood Group/s yet? Hop on Facebook and start searching for opportunities!

 

Engagement Bait

If you are not aware of Facebook’s engagement bait rules, get yourself schooled. Many businesses are not up to date with these guidelines and can get their accounts’ visibility reduced or even get locked out of their accounts. This is not a rumor. Even large organizations like Wired Magazine have been punished, as shared by a Wired Magazine social media community manager during a recent presentation at the Denver Digital Summit. We can sadly also tell you from firsthand experience that these reprimands are NO FUN.

Facebook defines engagement bait as using tactics that encourage people to interact with your content in order to boost visibility.

This is the reason you won’t see us recommending actions like these:

🚫 Tag three friends!
🚫 Like our page to be entered to win!
🚫 Share this for additional entries!

Be sure you or your social media manager are aware of the risks and how you can avoid a hand-slap or worse: see https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/259911614709806.

 

Image Makeovers

With all the filters and tools available, there is no reason to get stuck using ugly images to represent your practice. By ugly, I mean blurry, grainy, generic, or outdated images or graphics. If you are creating your own graphics, start using tools like Canva or PicMonkey to add polish to your presence. If you are using any stock photos (I hope you are using real life pics whenever possible), then be sure to use high quality, copyright-free images. A great free option is https://pixabay.com/.

Images and graphics represent your dentistry/expertise and brand, so make sure they represent you well. In the future, trends are moving more towards authenticity—one more consideration to add to the mix.

Another method of attractiveness you can leverage is positivity. There is enough negativity on social media, so why not set your practice apart by spreading smiles and good vibes.

The screenshot below is of a Facebook post I ran across recently on a dentist’s Facebook page. Ugh. Can we say, Freddie Krueger, come get your sweater! Who wants to be reminded that we are all getting older everyday? The days of scare tactics and negativity in dentistry should be over. The future is bright, and the numbers support it—we see higher levels of engagement, shares, likes, and comments with positive messaging. 🙂

 

Instagram: Hashtags and Geotags

I hope your practice is on Instagram. If not, you should get an account set up, asap. Instagram (aka Insta) has been the fastest-growing social media network in the past year. According to Pew Research, 35% of online adults used Instagram in 2018… and that statistic is sure to rise when updated statistics are released, considering the skyrocketing increase in Insta popularity.

Once set up on Instagram, be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to get discovered by using relevant location hashtags. You can use up to 30 hashtags on Instagram. While you’d never want to load that many hashtags on a Facebook post, they are to be expected on Insta.

Insta users will often check out their local hashtags, and that gives you a perfect opportunity to be discovered. If someone is looking at which posts show up for #Denver, your Denver practice will be be included in any #Denver discussions— all you have to do is include the hashtag in your post. Don’t forget to do your homework and add any other relevant local hashtags. In the case of Denver, for example, you might also use:

#MileHighCity

#DowntownDenver

#LODO

You can also include a geotag for your practice. Tagging your practice essentially creates a link on a map to your exact practice location. Research by SimplyMeasured showed that posts tagged with a location see 79% higher engagement than posts not tagged with a location. You can also include location tag via stickers in Instagram Stories. Stay tuned here for more on all things Instagram.

 

Schedule, Schedule, Schedule

With all the new social media options comes the potential for overwhelm. Not to worry, you can save time AND make your social media marketing more effective when you adopt planning and pre-scheduling. We here at Rita Zamora Connections recommend you plan your future month’s content out in a calendar. Some practices may do this on Facebook, or using a planning tool like Hootsuite. We have been using an agency-grade social media tool to do exactly this when we build custom content for our clients—so we know this is a proven method that works!

When planning your monthly content out, we recommend an 80/20 content mix. 80% social-related content and 20% dental-related content.

Be sure to focus your dental-related content on the type of dentistry you want to grow in your practice. Whether you want to attract dental implant, sleep dentistry, or clear aligner (we love OrthoFX) patients, you will never be successful unless you remember to post about these topics.

In fact, we are so passionate about these systems and processes that we recently launched a new “do social media with us” service, where we allow, by-invitation-only, practices to join us in this process. It’s a sure way to save time, while being more strategic about the type of dentistry you want to grow in your practice.

Reach out to info@RitaZamora.com if you are interested in learning more.