Dental Practice – Social Media: Key or Obstructive To Your Dental Success?

The social media buzz. Everybody’s talking about it, everywhere you surf, everywhere you read is social media. But how much can it affect your dental practice and is sending tweets every day going to fill your chair with quality dental patients?

Mind-boggling Statistics

The figures you hear in relation to social media are staggering. It’s easy to get caught up in the thinking that if you are not using social media your business will not survive in the future. But if you dig deep between the lines is there core return on investment and business case reason to implement social media strategies? Fundamentally does it get patients into your chair?

Every second there are more than 6000 tweets, 4000 Facebook updates, and over 300 hours per minute of video posted on YouTube.

So with all this action you could never say social media wasn’t important – could you?

Survive Or Die

Putting aside all the buzz and the hype – whether you own a dental practice, a restaurant or you have a plumbing business – if you are a small business owner your business will survive or die on your profit and loss. Every month you have to pay the rent, the employees and the taxman – the tax man certainly won’t take a few good tweets instead of the tax payment. I guess what I’m saying is that survival is based on your return each year. Getting quality patients into your practice is the only way of making your practice a success and maintains its success in the longer term.

In my opinion there are four fundamental factors that each dentist owner should focus on:

• Building great relationships – with patients and staff

• Referrals – predictable and accelerated word of mouth

• Building Credibility – planned, multi-touch predictable marketing to build your authority in the teeth whitening & dental implants Toronto industry local to your practice.

• Customer experience – the experience from the moment your patients walk through the door until they get back home and receive communication from you.

So based on this, it would be fair to say social media is an effective business strategy if it puts quality patients in your chair and shows a good return on investment.

Not Necessarily Quantifiable Value

Let's take a look at what social media delivers. Leave the buzz and hype to the side and lets see what benefits we can obtain by implementing these things.

1. Social media is engaging and brings out emotion, reaction and creates community amongst your patients. When people like something they are keen to share it with others – so if you provide a good dental service you can get one of the most successful marketing strategies to happen – which is the power of referrals. People make short, clear statements about products and services and shout about the ones that they had a really good experience with. They also shout about the things they have bad experiences or service.

2. Social media is about building relationships – you can keep yourself and your practice on the top of people’s mind. You make your patients feel like they know you and you automatically become more approachable.

3. Whether you are a great dentist or not you can build your profile and gain authority and credibility by promoting yourself online – this can be done using the tools of social media.

5 Steps To Social Media Success

If you are going to take the plunge on your own or with the help of some experts there are some basic things you need to grasp – whatever that level is.

1. Get clear before you start what you are going to use it for – driving traffic, building brand awareness, generating referrals or simply opening lines of communication with your patients
2. Identify which social media networks you are going to start with – there are loads to choose from – why not start with the big ones – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
3. How Much Time Can You Spend On Social Media? – Well you can, and some people do – spend all day tweet and like – but time is money and you don’t need to spend as much personal time as you think. Set a schedule twice a day for 20 minutes and repurpose the content you use.
4. Set a budget – most social media sites are free but you are still going to be paying in time, yours or your staff – and associate a cost to that.
5. Determine How You Will Measure Success – how are you going to calculate your return on investment? Via leads per day, how many sales or the amount each lead generates.

I guess therefore the answer to the question ‘Key or Obstructive To Your Dental Success’ is that as long as any marketing tool including social media strategies can show clear return on investment then it is worth doing.

And if you want all the benefits of city dental services Toronto without having to do any of the work yourself, whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Want someone else to do the work so you can focus on what is important for you, your dental work?

Find out how you can really benefit from social media for your Dental Practice NOW.

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