Social Media – Avoid These Common Errors

Is your dental social media manager making these mistakes?

As more dental practices start to roll out their social media campaigns, it’s natural to see mistakes made as the staff involved find their feet and get up to speed. To help avoid these common errors, here’s a quick summary of the main culprits. Forewarned is forearmed so hopefully our list of common errors will allow you to step in quickly to get things back on track.

Broadcasting without a plan

Whilst we don’t want to be too regimented about this, it is important to underpin your social efforts with a plan. For example, it’s important to understand how “social” contributes to SEO and how what you broadcast should be complementary to your overall web marketing efforts. Are you only tweeting about how cold it was when you got up this morning or are you also helping to subtly advertise the practice’s latest special offers? Balance is important here – you need to keep the self-promotion scaled back and concentrate on engagement first but do keep in mind the marketing objective and take the opportunities to promote your services when it’s appropriate.

Quality versus quantity

Whilst it is important to ensure that your social accounts are in regular use, don’t post rubbish. It may be appropriate to use your channels informally (but professionally!) but avoid random, uninteresting commentary that frankly, no-one wants to hear. Better to wait until you have something useful to stay than to fill your followers feeds with stuff that, frankly, most of them won’t care about.

Content – it’s not just about you

One of the best way to build an engaged community around your dental products and services using social media, is to broadcast information which you’ve found useful and you feel could also be useful for your followers. This could be links to interesting websites or any other snippet of information that others would find helpful. More about this here. Don’t spam your users with endless posts containing links to your own web properties – dilute these types of posts with other great content.

An essay with every post

Don’t be afraid of “short and sweet” – you don’t need to write a novel with every post. Often a few well-placed words are the most compelling, so think carefully before you try to fill up the full character allocation. However, sometimes it is appropriate to write more, for example longer articles on Google+ work very nicely to support SEO.

Be proactive but not pushy

Seek out and try to engage with other users whose content you find useful and who can also help achieve your goals. However, don’t push too hard or you will be quickly cast aside.

Failure to proofread

It’s easy to get too fixated on accuracy but better that than publish gobbledygook which makes you look unprofessional. Take a minute to look over your content to make sure that it reads well and that your spelling is spot on.

Automated thank-you’s are insincere

Whilst several of the common social channels have now removed the facility to “auto thank” new followers etc, there are still tools out there which can do this – don’t. Far more appropriate is a genuine thank-you written by you and it’s much more likely to stimulate interaction.

Spreading yourself too thin

New social media channels spring up all of the time and it can be tempting to dabble in all of them. However, it’s much better to identify the ones that suit your purpose best and concentrate your efforts there. We recommend Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as the “must haves” followed up with the likes of Pinterest and Instagram if you have time. Oh and don’t neglect your blog of course.

Failure to comply with regulatory guidelines

Last and most important is making sure you comply with regulatory guidelines. For dentists, this means understanding and complying with the GDC guidelines which incorporate a specific section on what cannot be broadcast via social media. It is also good practice to make sure that you compile a social media policy and that staff are trained appropriately in accordance with it.

Summary

Social media has become a must-have tool for dentists who are serious about establishing an effective on-line marketing strategy. However, such a strategy needs to be carefully planned and bound by a set of guidelines to work correctly. Watch out for the common mistakes identified above and step in quickly to correct them. If you would like to know more about the effective use of social media for dentists, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to advise.