Students: Grow Your Dental Society’s Social Media Following by Dr Ameen Daywood

Dr. Ameen Daywood, president of Barts and The London Dental Society, shares 7 tips for how to increase connection and engagement

Over the past 12 months, our dental society went from virtually no social media following on Instagram to having 700-plus followers and averaging around 120?likes per post. We have experienced similar successes with Facebook and Twitter.

This opened the door for increased sponsorship opportunities and provided a medium to engage with our students and staff. I believe any dental school in the UK can expect similar results by following these seven simple tips.

1. Be active and engage with the community

It’s simple: To get more likes and comments, you’ve got to do the same for others. This doesn’t mean spamming your followers with meaningless comments; instead, make them genuine and heartfelt. That way, followers are more likely to reciprocate.

Another consideration would be to shout out and celebrate the successes of your students and staff, who make up the bulk of your following. You’ll be surprised how much they appreciate this gesture.

2. Cross-promote and cross-pollinate

Use several platforms to promote your content, as there are different audiences on each one. If you’re trying to increase engagement on Instagram, then aim to figure out a way to funnel traffic from elsewhere to there. We do this often with our website and Facebook; we’ll post up to 10 photos from our events on the website, and provide a link to the full album on Facebook. The intent here is to encourage people to check out our Facebook and achieve synchronisation across all platforms.

3. Understand your analytics

Before you share content, identify the times your followers are most active. To this figure out, use free analytic tools such as Google Analytics. For Instagram, this can be done easily by changing the account settings to a business account. Our hotspots are from 6–9 pm. Find out yours, then strategically plan when to release posts for maximal engagement.

4. Jump on the #hashtag bandwagon

It’s a known fact: Images with hashtags generally perform better than those without. However, it’s important to consider how many and which hashtags to use. Different sources quote a range of optimal numbers; in my opinion, the more the better. Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags, I’d recommend using them all.

Furthermore, make a list of basic hashtags to use each time, altering them slightly according to the content. Seek broad and narrow hashtags, such as #dentistry and #londonschool, respectively. If you’re having difficulty coming up with some, consider using apps such as Hashtag Generator or Hashtagged. Also, do not place hashtags in the caption section—this looks messy and takes away from the caption. Instead place them in the comments, keeping everything nice and neat.

5. Incentivise your community

Give your followers a reason to engage with you. Consider hosting minicontests, such as declaring that the first person to comment on a particular post will receive a prize.

Many dental societies have sponsors who may be willing to provide prizes such as loupes that could be used to incentivise your community.

6. Type of content

Content should be entertaining and provide value. This keeps followers excited to see what’s coming next. Whether it’s videos, stories or posters, you’ve got to keep followers guessing.

In our experience, images with people tend to get the highest engagement, so it might be worth releasing more of these. For example, the post pictured on the previous page earned 151 likes. We had only 600 followers at the time, so that’s more than 25 percent of them tapping that ‘Like’ button!

7. Consistency

Every tactic until this point is useless unless you implement consistency. Not only does this improve your skills using social media, but it also gives your followers a reason to stay. It can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting that ‘perfect post,’ but don’t worry about the minutiae and just put things out there! Some activity is better than no activity.

Conclusion

I’ve shared what I believe are fundamental considerations for increasing your following organically and attracting engagement on your posts. I have no doubt that should you implement the tips in this article, you can expect substantial gains in the social media department.