How To Start Social Media Marketing for Your Dental Practice

If you’re looking for ways to bring in more patients to your dental practice, social media marketing is an excellent strategy to implement. Your dental office can use free social media accounts to engage with your target audience, market your dental services, and improve your brand image. You can also implement paid social media ads to reach more people. 

While beginning a social media marketing strategy can feel overwhelming, this process may be easier than you think. Read on to learn how to start social media dental marketing.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Your Dental Practice

Social media marketing is the process of using social media to advertise your dental practice. This strategy includes organic (free) and paid strategies. Whether your dental practice is just getting off the ground or has been in business for 50 years, you can use dental social media marketing to your advantage. 

Here are the main benefits of social media advertising:

• Low-cost marketing: Social media marketing is a budget-friendly advertising strategy. You don’t need to spend a penny on marketing your dental practice on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Linked In. While you can pay for social media ads, traditional social media marketing is entirely free. 
• Patient acquisition and retention: Your social media profiles are effective tools you can use to reach new dental patients and retain existing ones. People can learn about your dental care clinic through your social media and eventually create appointments. Meanwhile, your current patients can be reminded of your practice whenever they see your posts. 
• Brand building: You can use social media to build brand awareness and identity, which can help with recall and recognition. Your text, image, and video posts can represent your practice’s values and help your followers understand your practice better. 
• Engagement:  Patients often feel a sense of loyalty to healthcare practices that they have a personal connection to. When you interact with them on social media, they may view your practice as more human and choose you over other dental clinics in your area. 
• Organic targeting: Social media marketing enables you to reach patients in a space they frequent out of their own free will. People love spending time on social media. When your dental practice appears on their social media feed, they won’t view your post as a blatant advertisement, which may lead to a more positive association with your dental clinic. 

Social Media Platforms for Dentists To Use

This is the age of social media, and right now, many social platforms are hugely popular across the web. You should have an established presence on all major platforms to gain the most success from your dental social media marketing. These include:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

Understanding the trends and posting styles on each social platform can enhance your social media strategy. Here are a few trends to keep in mind as you begin shaping your social media channels:

• Over one-third of the audience on Facebook is over 45.
• Sixty percent of TikTok users are between 16 and 24. 
• LinkedIn is a professional social media platform with business-oriented posts.
• YouTube is best for long-form video content, while TikTok videos should be three minutes or less.
• Twitter is best for short text posts and images.
• Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok all have “stories” features. 
• Facebook Live, TikTok Live, and Instagram Live allow you to live-stream videos. You should also know the types of content these platforms allow: 
• Facebook: Text, image, and video content
• Instagram: Videos and images
• TikTok: Videos (with text descriptions)
• Twitter: Text, videos, and images
• YouTube: Mainly videos, but you can include text and images on your profile
• LinkedIn: Text, videos, and images

The best way to understand these platforms well is to make an account on each one and observe other users. You can also search for dental practices on each platform to see which posts on their channels perform best. 

Building Your Dental Social Media Marketing Strategy

While posting to social media may seem like a piece of cake, your dental office should put care and consideration into your social media marketing campaign. Approaching social media strategically can ensure that your efforts pay off — and that you don’t make any mistakes that could harm your brand’s reputation. 

Here is our guide to building your dental social media marketing campaign. 

Consistent Content Cadence

Your dental practice should post on each social media channel consistently. Creating a content calendar is the best way to ensure consistency in your social media presence. 

We recommend sitting down at the beginning of the month and planning the types of social media content you will post throughout the month. This content should be relatively evergreen, meaning that you can post it on any day and it will still make sense to users and be accurate. 

You can plan the following types of content:

• Engagement posts
• Posts about your dental services
• Polls and surveys
• “Behind-the-scenes” looks into your office 
• Giveaways

Creating this content in advance can save you time during the month. Many social platforms even allow you to schedule content, enabling you to upload your posts at once and disperse them throughout the month on specific days. 

You can also intersperse a few “social media holiday” posts in your content calendar. These posts celebrate fun, little-known holidays, like National Opposite Day and National Taco Day. (Be sure to mark your calendar for National Dentist’s Day on March 6th). 

Of course, you can always hire a dental marketing agency to create social media posts for you. But if you’re trying to save money or benefit from a free marketing campaign, you’ll need to put in the work to create them yourself (or enlist a staff member to do so). 

Finding Your Brand Voice

Your dental social media posts should reflect your brand voice. You’ll need to take some time to build your brand voice with each post. 

Your dental practice’s brand voice is the personality and tone you take within all of your communications. Your voice should target your desired audience and be consistent throughout each social media account. 

A few examples of brand voice descriptors include:

• Warm and personable
• Conversational
• Humorous
• Professional
• Educational
• Cut and dry

Consider which tone will resonate most with your audience. Many healthcare practices take a more professional tone to indicate their expertise in the dental industry. If you choose this route, you can focus on before-and-after posts, informative text posts, and descriptions of your services. 

But some dentists have found success using a more silly, humorous tone — such as The Bentist on TikTok. This strategy may be more successful for pediatric dentists or those looking to target teens and young adults. 

If you want to keep your page more professional but still make jokes from time to time, you can use your Stories features for more casual posts. Your Facebook and Instagram Story allows for temporary posts that last for 24 hours. You can post behind-the-scenes photos and videos to these platforms while keeping your main social media profile clean. 

While social media is a casual marketing platform, you need to be careful about making any jokes that users could view as offensive. “Cancel culture” abounds on social media. When companies make one wrong move, their reputation can be instantly ruined.

Calls-to-Action (CTA)

You should make sure to curate every social media post with a dental marketing focus. Digital marketing emphasizes the necessity of calls to action, and you should include these in your social content as well. 

Calls to action are short phrases that invite viewers to act. They typically contain four parts:

• A command verb
• An action
• A time
• A reason 

For example, one CTA for your dental practice may be “Visit our website now to schedule your next cleaning.” You may also use “Contact us today to learn more.” 

CTAs should include a sense of urgency and incentivize the user to complete the action. They should also have an easy way for users to reach you. We recommend including your contact information, such as your phone number, website, email, and address, in your social media profile’s biography section. 

However, it’s also possible to take too much of a sales tone with your social media CTAs. We don’t recommend including a CTA on every post. You want to foster organic interactions with users, which means helping them forget that your goal is to market your practice. 

Focus on authenticity over sales and ensure that your posts always provide value to your followers. 

Engaging With Your Audience

Social media is an excellent platform to engage with your target audience. While emailing, calling, and texting your patients can sound too sales-centric, posting on social media is a low-pressure way to foster organic interactions with them. 

When users comment on your social media posts, they do so out of their own free will, not because you asked them to. This type of communication can create positive connections between your followers and your dental practice. 

Your dental practice should also use your social media pages to communicate directly with commenters. We recommend responding to about 30% to 40% of the comments you receive on your posts. When your followers see that you have directly communicated with them about something, they may be more likely to choose your practice in the future. 

Social media is also a platform people use to read reviews of businesses. When patients review your practice on your social media page, you can respond to their reviews directly to leave a heartfelt thank you or attempt to rectify any negative emotions toward your practice. 

We don’t recommend asking for reviews through social media posts. Instead, use automatic reviews request software to invite patients to leave reviews after their appointments. 

Encourage Existing Patients To Follow You

Finally, your social media marketing efforts won’t be very successful if you don’t have many followers. While you can set up a social media ad campaign to reach users who don’t follow your account, you can also take measures to invite existing and potential patients to engage with your social media pages. 

Once you begin your social strategy, be sure to inform your staff about your new social pages and invite them to follow you. You should also train your staff to begin sharing the news with patients wherever they can naturally. 

For example, your staff can mention your social media presence when telling patients how to get in contact with you. Their phrasing can look something like, “If you have any questions about your treatment, you can give us a call or email us. We also always respond to messages on social media.” 

Next, begin thinking of ways to advertise your social media platforms. You can:

• Include your social media handles in your email newsletter
• Incorporate links to social pages on your dental website
• Put your social media handles in your email signature
• Include your social media handles throughout your waiting area, such as on business cards or in a framed photo on the front desk
• Include links to specific social media posts in your email content
• Embed social media posts on your dental website

If you’re still struggling with your follower count after a few weeks, you may consider hosting a giveaway in which participants must follow your social media account to enter. If you decide to host a giveaway, be sure to stick to the rules and requirements on your intended platform. 

Great Examples of Dental Social Media Marketing

Finally, we wanted to include a few examples of effective dental social media marketing that you can reference for your own campaign. 

Corina Layton is a Registered Dental Hygienist with 2.4 million followers on TikTok. She posts helpful dental tips, daily vlogs, and engaging content about her life. 

Whitney DiFoggio, also known as “Teeth Talk Girl,” is a dental expert who shares educational content on YouTube and Instagram. She has over 330,000 YouTube subscribers. 

Todd Snyder is a cosmetic dentist known for his before and after photos on Instagram. His pages do an excellent job showcasing the power of high-quality dentistry. 

These dental social media pages incorporate dentistry into a more comprehensive social strategy. These users are not just dentists marketing their practices — they’re also social media influencers. 

But you can reference their pages to see the types of content that could perform well on your own social platforms. Be sure to also follow local dental professionals in your area — both to gain content inspiration and to showcase friendly engagement with these competitors. 

Final Thoughts

If your dental practice does not currently use social media marketing, you’re missing out on an effective strategy to reach more patients. Combining social media marketing with other digital marketing strategies, such as content marketing, dental SEO, and Facebook ad campaigns can boost your profitability tenfold. 

If you don’t feel confident navigating social media marketing yourself, you can look into dental marketing services or social media management to get the job done for you. You can also incorporate patient automation software into your daily processes to streamline marketing efforts. 

With Weave, you can communicate with patients through text, streamline billing, send automatic appointment reminders, and much more. Request your free Weave demo today to learn more.