Does my practice need to be on Twitter?

by AdminPosted on January 1, 2015 Posted in social

Twitter for dentists – does it make sense?

Earlier this week I discussed the pros and cons of Twitter with an experienced dental practice manager. The guy is quite savvy about the benefits of online marketing and had been tasked by his principle to deliver the “best bang for buck” from their web marketing initiatives. Very solid and commendable objectives.

To support their new website, the practice started to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, along with a plan to start blogging and structured search marketing to boost their Google ranking. Within the first couple of months, the practice accrued over 700 Twitter followers – however, soon after they closed the account.

This came as a slight surprise, particularly as they had made good headway, at least as far as followers are concerned, in a relatively short space of time. The explanation was understandable in that the manager had quickly realised that the huge majority of their followers were of a “business to business” nature and not their preferred target i.e. existing patients or potential new ones. Given that the guy was looking for quick and quantifiable ROI, he made the decision to quit Twitter and focus resources elsewhere. Understandable but potentially premature – but why?

The less-well understood benefits of an active Twitter presence

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Why your outsourced social media marketing isn’t working

by AdminPosted on November 25, 2014 Posted in social

Bland dental social media posts ≠ patient engagement

Active use of social media is important for a number of reasons; the primary ones being patient engagement, to demonstrate “social proof” (more here) and also to indirectly assist your search engine rankings. The individual elements are covered in detail elsewhere in this blog.

But is your social media marketing (or SMO as it is known) something which you can just hand off to a third party marketing organisation for a few hundred pounds a month, or is it something which you need to take an active role in at the practice? Let’s take a closer look at what’s needed to make your social media efforts pay off….

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How to use Twitter to gather information for dental marketing

by AdminPosted on November 12, 2014 Posted in social

How Twitter can be used to fuel your content marketing.

One of the questions I’m regularly asked when training dental teams is about how to keep momentum in their social media campaigns. It’s relatively easy to convey the benefits of social media and also easy enough to set up the appropriate channels for dentists to use; however the hard part starts next i.e. actually getting sufficient content out there to attract an audience and encourage them to engage with you.

Panic usually sets in when the dental team or the nominated “social champion” start to wonder how they will be able to think about suitable topics and worse, how do they get sufficient time to write about them. We’ve probably all seen the social media accounts of dentists where they started out with good intentions and then within a few weeks the tweets and posts disappear to nearly nothing? Indeed I would suggest that there are more examples of this than where accounts are actively being managed and delivering results.

Well it doesn’t have to be such an uphill struggle and with a little bit of guidance and an understanding of how to make the process a whole lot easier, you can be successful with social media without killing your time schedule.

Here’s one quick way to help you gather the content you need to keep your social media rolling……

Using Twitter to gather information as well as for broadcasting it

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