Maintaining momentum with dental practice social media
How to find useful information to supplement your own content and how to post it efficiently.
Many dental practices have joined the social media revolution to help broadcast their services and raise awareness in local communities.
However, a number of them are already falling by the way-side as the struggle to generate new and useful content kicks in and time to post runs short.
So what can you do to make social media activity as efficient as possible?
First off, it is important to realise that you don’t need to write everything yourself. Whilst all of your blog content needs to be unique, a large proportion of what you send out via your social channels can actually be curated from elsewhere. This is a widely accepted technique and really helps to beef up your activity without the risk of getting bogged down in trying to do it all yourself.
However, it’s not simply a case of just broadcasting or re-tweeting/re-posting any old content that crosses your path. You need to identify what might be useful to your followers and then re-use this sensibly. You can also re-purpose some of it to add a personal touch.
The next thing to understand is where to get hold of suitable content to help supplement your own and this is not as tricky as it might seem at first. Twitter is an excellent source of information – follow the right people and monitor what they post to see if this will also be useful for you and your audience. You can find as much as 70% of your content this way and then supplement this with 30% of your own material.
Remember that if you found a piece of content to be useful, then the chances are that your audience will too – and there’s every chance that they won’t have seen it already. There are also social media “search engines” where you can pick up on useful articles and news associated with terms that you select.
Take 15 minutes to monitor channels such as Twitter every morning and you will quickly gather a wealth of useful material. However, you do need to put effort into adding your own material too – remember that users really do empathise with personalised content so try to get a good chunk of practice related material in the mix too.
Just a quick reminder here – there are some clear GDC guidelines on what a dentist can and can’t post on social media so please make sure that all members of the team are trained and signed-off appropriately. If you need more information about this, please give our team a call.
Posting efficiently
Whilst it is easy to over-do automation when it comes to social media, some tools are essential and will make your life much easier. For example, ‘Hootsuite’ is an excellent system which allows you to consolidate most of your social channels into one, easy-to-use, administration panel. This removes the chore of signing in to lots of different websites to make your posts.
If you want to really get slick, why not investigate tools like “IFTTT” – If This, Then That? This tool allows you to create mini algorithms (don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds) which carry out additional tasks based on what happened before.
So for example, if you updated your Facebook profile, you can set IFTTT to automatically update similar on Twitter – really powerful stuff.
Summary
Tools like blogging and social media are very important but can be a drain on time and resources. However, you don’t have to do everything yourself – for example, curating useful content and re-broadcasting it is a recognised way of building and maintaining momentum in your social media channels. In addition, tools like Hootsuite and IFTTT really come in handy for managing the overall process and are free to use.
If you need help with understanding social media and implementing it in the most effective and efficient ways possible, Dental Media provide an “in-practice” training service to help get your team up to speed. We will then monitor progress remotely and step in as needed should your team require assistance. Please call us on 01332 672548 if you would like to discuss in more detail.