Four Steps to Effective Social Media Marketing
Social media can be a very effective tool for marketing your business. It allows you to show your values, your personality and who you are as a practice before a customer enters your office. There are steps you can take to make social media really work for you.
Posted in Risk Management on Friday, September 7, 2018
- First off, develop a strategy. Why do you want people to read your posts? Who do you want to read them? What emotion do you want to attach to it? Here are a few ideas:
- Post about what is happening in the community (similar to a community calendar). People will visit and share your page if they come to rely on you for great content.
- Don’t be afraid to share stories and images of the happenings at the office – as long as they don’t include anything patient-related. Photos and fun details about the company picnic are great. A photo of a patient sitting in your new dental chair is not.
- Appropriate humor is good. People like and share things that make them laugh, think or feel.
- Second, be visible. This may require using different techniques to keep people coming back. When you post a blog on the website, share a link on Twitter and post a snippet and link in Facebook. Don’t worry about oversaturation. It’s highly unlikely that your Facebook friends also follow you on Twitter. People tend to pick one of the two and spend most of their time there.
- Third, link to other sources. These links improve the visibility of your posts and make you more "important" to Google searches and news feeds on Facebook. The internet values interconnectivity.
- Fourth, timing of your posts plays a role. Because the newsfeed moves so quickly (especially on Twitter) you’ll want to think through the best time of day or night to post to ensure lots of your friends see your content. Posting new or shared content a couple of times a week on Twitter and Facebook is fine, but be sure to ‘like’, share and comment on other people’s posts in the meantime. You want to be consistent, without being annoying.
Most important: Be consistent.