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Point/Counterpoint: Social Media by James AcAnally, DDS

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Touted as “low-cost” and even mistakenly as “free,” many dentists are flocking to Facebook and similar services believing this activity will increase new patients to their practices. Before diving in to create a “presence” on Facebook that requires ongoing doctor or staff time commitment, here are 10 things to help you understand this media, who it’s most valuable for and the reality of what it means for the dental practice.

Understand Celebrity.
Three questions help clarify any dentist’s belief about their celeb status.

  • Are you really a celebrity or personality the public wants to follow or see social updates from?
  • When’s the last time 500,000+ people watched you get drunk on the Jersey Shore and fall down or do something else laughingly stupid?
  • Did your last pop album do really well or did the pro team you play for bomb out last season? The point of these questions is that the public wants to know what their favorite celebrity, athlete or singer had for breakfast and wore out on Saturday night. Unless you have some really bad luck (i.e. overdosing a celebrity in your practice), you simply won’t get enough of the general public to care about you in the same way.

However, there is real power in becoming a mini-celebrity in your location as part of the ongoing picture of practice promotion. The direct path to becoming a mini-celebrity is through your existing patients and via an annual offline event (think practice anniversary or annual doctor birthday bash held somewhere fun (i.e. not your office). You are literally buying your celebrity with the patients by celebrating something with them, rather than by some forced social media “liking” game.

To Get Thousands of Fanatics, You’ll Need a Million Users.
Creating a venue where fanatics can get together is a great idea. Mass consumer product marketers would be fools to leave this out of their total marketing equation. Apple computer surmised over a decade ago that they could allow its legions of unpaid fans to help problem solve technical issues with software and devices via their “help forums.” This actually made them into even more rabid fans.

Coke, in late 2011, changed the color of its can as part of an environmental PR awareness campaign and it backfired. The end user (i.e. Coke drinker) was confused about what was in the can based on color – was it Coke, Diet Coke, or something else? Their fans commented forcefully and quickly on Facebook with the majority not liking the cans. Coke quietly ate “humble pie” and phased the cans out quickly.

The important things to understand is a) for every fan, there are another 100,000 who could care less about the can color, and b) it takes a lot of fans to create enough of them to have a public outcry either good or bad about the product/service to get the product more attention from those who really couldn’t be bothered. An even more powerful lesson from the Coke can color confusion is that if the average consumer can’t understand a red versus white can or read a simple label to understand what’s happened, what are the odds they could understand what any dentist is selling, especially those vending services beyond emergency, pain-based treatment? Not likely…

Think about how many “raving fans” you have in your practice. If you do a good job, make promises and fulfill them, invariably you create a few of these fans. Count them up and divide them by your total patient base and see what the percentage is. If you are lucky, it’s one or two percent. Additionally, we have a very finite ability to reach a critical mass of customers in a lifetime of dentistry; thus, the odds of creating a foundation of raving fans big enough to send a marketing tsunami into the social media realm to help your business are nil.

Life and Death Situations and Political Organizations Benefit Greatly from Social Media.
The recent firestorm sweeping through the Middle East, the toppling of a few dictators and the Republican campaign serve as good examples of how social media organizing tools and instant Tweets (a glorified electronic telegram) are valuable when something really important is brewing that is literally life or death.

While not life-death on the immediate timeline, yet still applicable along the same vein, the recent “occupy” protesters wielded this media effectively to keep itself organized for a much greater length of time than similar previous political protests.

Where does dentistry fall in the spectrum of “life and death” information or critical instantaneous political organizing?

It Really is About Being Social.
Watch your spouse, kid’s behavior or your own when you go into these environments. Do you care about what your optometrist found out last week at the National Optometry Meeting? No, but you do want to see a funny video that your niece posted or a photo of a newborn grandchild.

Right Now Businesses Benefit.
Social media, particularly some Twitter tools in major metropolitan areas, are showing signs of being valuable in “right now” categories of services especially when a search term is tied to geography.

What's a right now service? Well, the two at the top of the list are hair salons and car repair. For example, someone Tweets, 'My car just broke down, does anyone know someone good?!?' The search is picked up by a screening tool, forwarded to the buyer of the tool (in this case a local garage in the area) who quickly Tweets a response to the potential customer.

Why does this work for them? It doesn’t hurt that these services are utilized by more people and are utilized more often than dentists. But the real reason for the success is that there are simply more “emergencies” per capita for these service categories compared to ours.

How many people need emergency car service? The U.S. has the highest number of cars per household on the planet. Any way you slice it up, it’s a lot of cars and when a car breaks down people want service yesterday.

What about hair? Unless you are shaving your head, wearing a wig or your spouse/significant other/yourself is cutting your hair with the $35 Flowbee, you’re utilizing a “hair service provider” on some sort of regular basis. There are also a lot of “big hair” occasions – funerals, weddings, birthdays, retirement, big date, first/last day of (insert whatever) so it’s not difficult to understand why people wake up on a given morning realizing that tonight is Aunt Jane’s 14th wedding anniversary and absolutely have to have their hair cut/fixed/dyed now!

Toothache “right now” will likely join this category. A few dentists in each large market areas who love treating single teeth toothaches will likely benefit.

Look at Your Choosing Behavior.
When was the last time you personally used Facebook to find your cancer specialist, architect or heart doctor?

Work Fills the Time Allotted (aka Parkinson’s Law).
In the 1950s, The Economist magazine featured an article by Cyril Parkinson describing a phenomenon. The author is long gone and the situation he described – the growth in Britain’s colonial office employees continuing to increase annually all the way up to when the empire imploded with no more colonies to administer – no longer exists, his observations are still applicable. Regardless of the amount of work to be done, add employees at a rate of five to seven percent. This, as an annual constant, has held up in many private and public environments studied since his original description.

If Facebook “work” is unleashed in a practice, it will either require more staff or, in a far more likely fashion, divert existing staff away from more important tasks like handling phone calls correctly, following up on prospects and face-to-face selling in office. It’s easy to waste hours on updates and sneaking in games of Farmville instead of doing real work of promotion and selling.

Learn From Your Smartest Peers.
I am fortunate enough to work with some of the highest performing dentists in the profession who seek promotional and selling advice and training beyond the average practitioner. A sizeable number of these clients are high “quick start” Kolbe personality types and quickly test anything put forth to the profession as a potential tool to find more patients for their practice well before the trends take hold.

Universally, to this writing date, not a single one of these “quick start” practices reports social media activity having any real or substantial pay-off or returns. The feedback is, “If I did this again, I’d just put up a page with a few testimonials, link it to our main Web page and then simply forget about it.”

Learn From What the Best Marketers are Doing.
If you had to pick a group of businesses who must market very well to keep the doors open you’d look to those seeking donors and subscribers. These businesses essentially work to get money for almost nothing tangible in return (charity or a magazine). Changes in subscriber numbers are addressed very quickly as they are the lifeblood of the business. As a consequence, whatever these categories focus on by way of promotion and selling deserves attention from anyone seeking to glean fact from fiction.

During the social media run-up, every business was running to create their “social media empire.” But that was 24 months ago. Now the companies who are dependant on donations or subscriptions are refocusing on their “traditional” means of acquiring customers. A VP of the American List Council (a very big broker and manager of consumer lists) reports recently, “The shift to social media and online marketing simply did not deliver the volume companies like Habitat for Humanity, Economist Group, Dow Jones, Hearst and Red Cross needed. We’re seeing mail quantities up across the board.” Translation: They are mailing for new customers and switching back to follow-up mail to existing customers; the same “boring” stuff that delivered the results before the social media storm hit.

Dental Practices are Local Not National.
National consumer goods makers have incorporated social media into their umbrella of marketing but, to date, none have cut off their other ongoing promotional routines (i.e. use of direct to consumer media, advertising and incentives) to generate sales. National and worldwide companies have not abandoned other marketing.

A dental practice’s real market is within approximately a 30- to 60-minute commute around it. The 60-minute distance is actually very dependent on how strong marketing is. In other words, without pushing into local mass media, practices seldom draw patients from more than a 30-minute distance. Targeting enough viable prospects within a 30-minute distance using Facebook doesn’t justify the expense, as there are much less costly ways to go.

Conclusion
Beyond these 10 things, ultimately, every practice has a very limited amount of energy, dollars and time! The reality is every “new patient” strategy, every strategy that creates prospective patient phone calls and actual patient consults and patients going into treatment must all be looked at from the standpoint of how many of these resources are available and consumed by the activity.

It seems foolish to use enormous resources devoted to an activity that has yet to show major patient generation, particularly when in competition with traditional media that are shown to deliver desired patient types again and again.
Author's Bio
Dr. James McAnally is the CEO of Big Case Marketing and founder of the Master Dentists Academy; organizations at the forefront of applying science and behavior to practice marketing and the ethical selling of elective dental services. A clinical background of 17 years plus multiple advanced clinical credentials gives Dr. McAnally unique insight into the everyday frustrations in dentistry. He and his organizations have gone on to develop promotional tools, ads, strategies and systems to allow clinically qualified colleagues to have more satisfaction from their cases and financial satisfaction from their practice life.
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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