Practical social media tips for your practice

Getting active on social media without using impersonal, outsourced services.

The advantages from using social media for client engagement and to assist search engine optimisation (SEO) have been documented many times and there is no need to re-iterate that here.

However, as with all tools and techniques, there are effective and ineffective ways to manage your social media. This became even more apparent to me yesterday as I conducted a detailed training session for an enthusiastic dental team at an established practice on the border between Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

What became increasingly apparent as we brainstormed ideas for blogs and social media content, was that those practices who undertake at least a portion of the work themselves, are typically far more successful than those who simply outsource it. So why is this?

Personalisation and ownership

My last blog discussed how practices can differentiate themselves, not only in their processes and procedures at practice level, but also in how they portray themselves via their web properties e.g. the practice website. The guys who thrive personalise all of this rather than rely on the generic stuff that is all too obvious out there.

Of course, social content and blogging is no different. Those that make the effort to generate material which is interesting and stimulating for the target audience, all tend to fare better in the engagement stakes.

The ideal format

The practice I visited yesterday has, what I consider to be, the ideal format for handling their blogging and social media efforts. This is structured as follows:

• periodic training and remote mentoring from Dental Media.
• three members of staff (including one clinician) who have shared responsibility for managing the content generation and user feedback.
• a defined agenda item at the weekly staff meeting to review progress. All staff members are tasked to generate new ideas for the content generation even if they are not personally responsible for creating it. Identifying new and interesting topics is often the hardest part so involving everyone is a great idea.
• most importantly, time is allocated away from “routine” duties for the task in hand. For this practice, this equates to approximately one man day per week to write blog articles and manage social media channels.

Whilst I can’t comment on the time available at practices without visiting and auditing, my feeling is that many practices with medium/large teams can manage their social media without resorting to additional resource.

The return on this investment is difficult to calculate directly (ROI for social media usually is) but what I can say is that their social channels are full of “engaged” patients, their blog posts appear prominently in Google and their new patient intake is buoyant. I’m more than confident that this is time very well spent.

“But I just don’t have the resource to do this”

This is often one of the main concerns that is expressed in the opening conversations about blogging and social media. If this really is the case, we can still get you up and running with our fully managed packages – however, I will not pretend that this is as effective as where practices are personally involved; at least to some extent. If any social media agency tells you that they can empathise and engage with your patients equally as well as you can, then I respectfully suggest that they can’t. However, doing nothing is not really an option.

How can Dental Media help you?

Our social media and blogging services extend from setting up a blog and customised social channels for you to run, right through to a fully managed service. Our trainer will also be pleased to visit your practice to train your team members and provide remote mentoring support services to help keep you on track. Please call us on 01332 672548 to discuss in more detail.