Facebook for dentists is the best social media site to help you reach potential patients for your practice. Although Facebook doesn’t charge you to have a dental Facebook page or to post on your Facebook page, its algorithm limits the reach of posts unless one of two things happens:
- - You pay Facebook to promote the post as a standalone dental Facebook ad or a boosted dental Facebook post, or
- - Facebook sees people engaging with a post.
With paid posts, Facebook will generally share it with as many people as you pay to reach. That’s a great option for many dentists. My team and I have received up to 5,000% return on ads we’ve placed for my practice and other dentists we serve through our dental marketing done-for-you services.
To reach more people organically, your post needs to get them to engage with it by liking or otherwise reacting to it, commenting on it, or sharing it on their timeline.
Just like your goal might be to attract as many people as possible to your page and keep them there or get them to your site or your dental marketing funnel, Facebook wants users to stay on its site as long as possible. Thus, it wants to make their experience there as pleasant as possible and reduces the organic reach of business posts until it believes people like it. One of the ways it determines that is through engagement. The more people interact with your post, the more people Facebook will show it to organically.
The Best Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
The best dental Facebook posts to help you increase organic reach are those that capture people’s attention while doing one or more of the following things:
- - Sharing your practice story
- - Sharing your core values
- - Showing what makes your practice unique
- - Evoking a positive emotion in people on a personal level
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For example, in my practice, we stock our office with gourmet coffees and teas, lend iPads and noise-canceling headphones to patients, participate in community events, host charity drives, and regularly run contests and competitions. When we post about those activities—especially with great photos—we take or videos we make, our posts get dozens and even hundreds of likes, comments, and shares, and our posts reach thousands of people.
Other examples of good posts include those that:
- - are about a kids’ club program logo you have or a picture of a happy kids’ club member
- - celebrate with a great team member
- - show off group perks you give your team members such as the loaded e-readers we give to ours
- - feature events you host at your office
- - highlight a team-building event like a night out or baby shower
- - celebrate local events
- - show you donating dental services to less fortunate people
- - share patient testimonials
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For my practice, we posted about community impact being one of our core values and included an image of us smiling with the winner of our free smile makeover giveaway competition, which we call Project Smiles. That post got dozens of engagements and reached 5,000 people organically because it got people’s attention and gave them something to connect with emotionally.
Another Project Smiles post reached over 10,000 people organically before we added an additional 45,000 people to our reach with a small paid boost.
Both of those posts had great imagery, shared some of our practice’s story, core values, and what makes us different than other dental practices. They were about building stronger communities and showed how we were making a difference. Thus, we were able to evoke a positive emotion in people and earn their engagement.
The more people engaged, the more people we reached, which helped us:
- - capture more people’s attention in a positive way
- - share our practice story with more people
- - get our practice name seen in more feeds
- - get people to know, like, and trust us
- - convert people to patients
- - get in front of current patients who might need a subtle reminder to schedule another patient
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When your dental Facebook page is set up professionally and optimized to build relationships with people, this engagement can help you skyrocket your ability to convert strangers to patients.
The Worst Dental Facebook Posts for Organic Reach
Just like certain types of dental Facebook posts can encourage and increase engagement, other types can restrict engagement for the same reasons. If you’re on Facebook as a user, what posts capture your attention? What posts are you most likely to engage with?
Most users won’t be interested in stock content, boring posts, or negative imagery such as the picture of an in-progress wisdom-tooth extraction I saw on another dentist’s timeline! Those posts can be simple and easy to find, but they’re unlikely to earn any engagement or reach.
When planning your post to maximize engagement, get into the mindset of a Facebook user. Would you be interested in that post if it were in your feed? If your answer is no, don’t post it.
Instead, ask how you can change the post to be more interesting to and evoke emotion in people on Facebook.
Are Your Dental Facebook Posts Not Earning Engagement and Reach?
If you struggle to get people to engage with your dental Facebook posts, it might be that they don’t evoke emotions within people to earn their engagement.
If you want more help with dental Facebook marketing, you can get access to my full Facebook course, social media images, my Facebook funnel course, email marketing course, and more inside Delivering WOW U. Sign up for your no-risk trial today!
Please also join our free Facebook Group, where thousands of dentists are helping each other grow their practice!
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWow.com