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7 Tips to Grow Your Practice Using Social Media by Dave Kerpen

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Gone are the days of using the Yellow Pages, Valpak and direct mail to successfully market your practice. Today, savvy dentists use search marketing, SEO and various social media platforms to market their practices. There are more than a billion people on Facebook, including more than 175 million Americans, or one in two adults.1 Twitter recently surpassed 400 million accounts2 and LinkedIn boasts more than 200 million users.3 Many dentists are trying to take advantage of these trends, but few are fully reaping the rewards.

For many dentists, the temptation is to use social networks to promote themselves and broadcast their messages. But if you stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a patient, you'll understand that the secret to social media is the social more than the media. It's being human, being the sort of person at a cocktail party who listens attentively, tells great stories, shows interest in others, and is authentic and honest. The secret is to be likeable.

Here are seven tips to be more likeable and ensure greater success using social media:

  1. Listen first and never stop listening. Before your first Tweet, search Twitter for people talking about your practice and your competitors. Search using words that your prospective patients would use. For example, use the words "looking for a dentist" or "have a toothache" in your town. You'll be surprised how many people are already looking for you.

  2. Don't tell your patients to like you or follow you, tell them why and how they should. Everywhere you turn, you see "Like us on Facebook" and "Follow us on Twitter." Why? Give your patients a reason to connect with you on social networks, by answering the question, "What's in it for me?" Then make it incredibly easy to do. Note the difference between these two calls to action: "Like our page on Facebook" versus "Get answers to your dental and oral health questions at www.facebook.com/likeabledentists."

  3. Be authentic. Your patients don't want to read impersonal posts about the importance of seeing a dentist every six months. Instead, be human and be yourself. Are you participating in an oral health study at a local university? Share it with your fans! Know a few dentist jokes? Tell them! Imagine how much positive feedback you would get if you asked, "What did the dentist of the year get? A little plaque." Write posts that show your practice's personality and watch your online community engage and grow.

  4. Ask questions. Wondering why nobody's responding to your posts on Facebook? It's probably because you're not asking questions. Social media is about engagement and having a conversation, not about self-promotion. If a dentist posts on Facebook, "Call and make your next appointment today," nobody will comment, and nobody will call to make that appointment. If that same dentist posts a question as simple as, "What's your favorite brand of toothpaste?" people will be more likely to comment online and engage with the practice. Better yet, if that same dentist asks, "What's the scariest part about going to the dentist?" think of the number of people who will comment on the post and bring attention to the practice. It is important for dentists to understand Edgerank, Facebook's formula for determining what shows up in people's ever-crowded newsfeeds.

  5. Surprise and delight your patients.. Want to bring more attention to your practice's social media pages and become more likeable overall? Learn ways to surprise and delight your patients on a regular basis. Offer contests and raffles or encourage your community to join the conversation for a chance to win a year's worth of free toothpaste and floss. Better yet, offer a free visit for a lucky patient who calls and makes an appointment that day! Remember, free is like magic and a delighted patient will share the experience with friends and family.

  6. Share pictures and videos. People love photos. The biggest reason Facebook skyrocketed to a billion users in seven years is photos. Photos and videos tell stories about you in ways that text alone cannot. You don't need a big production budget, either. Use your smartphone to take pictures and short videos of patients, staff, and cool things at your office, and then upload them directly to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. A picture of a child with a cavity-free smile is great, and a video of a dentist entertaining his patients dressed like a giant toothbrush is even better!

  7. Spend at least 30 minutes a day on social media. If you bought a newspaper ad or radio ad, you wouldn't spend only five minutes on it or relegate it to interns, so don't do it with social media. There's a lot to learn, and every week new tools and opportunities emerge across social networks. Spend time each day reading and learning, listening and responding, and truly joining the conversation. The more time and effort you put into social media, the more benefits your practice will receive.
I think we all agree that broken appointments are not good for the practice. Through our investigations into the causes of broken appointments, we've discovered many times they could have been avoided if the practice had been more proactive. It's easy to blame broken appointments on the patients and it's easy to start threatening a broken appointment fee. But I'd like to see practices be more proactive. With the right protocols in place, practices have more control over broken appointments than they ever imagined.

The tips listed are critical to maintain and grow an online community, but before you even consider social media, remember Facebook will help magnify and multiply the conversations about your practice. Will you be happy about the nature of those conversations?

Before you get involved with external communications like online marketing, advertising and social media, look internally at your practice. The secret to the most effective marketing of all is so simple: just be likeable!


References
  1. http://ansonalex.com/infographics/facebook-user-statistics-2012-infographic/
  2. http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn

Dave Kerpen, is the founder and CEO of Likeable Dentists (www.likeabledentists.com), a marketing solution that makes social media easy and effective. He is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Likeable Social Media. For more information, visit www.davekerpen.com.

Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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