Social Media Marketing for Dentists: A Complete Guide

Social media has grown into an important business tool within the past several years, reaching far past the early days of only being a place for posting food photos and selfies. Established businesses often have a robust presence across several social platforms.

Social media marketing for dentists is an effective and inexpensive way to attract patients. In today’s digital age, people rely on social media channels as information tools for virtually everything they care about! This means news, businesses, brands, restaurants, and people.

Dental practices can use social media to advertise and promote their services, specials, promotions, new locations, educational content, routine appointment reminders, and more, keeping patients engaged with their care.

The Best Social Media Sites for Dental Marketing

When first starting out with social media marketing for your dental practice, it can be difficult to know how to begin with so many different platforms to choose from. Let’s focus on the top social media sites that dental practices should have a presence on.

#1. Facebook

With over 2.9 billion daily users, Facebook is a great place to start with marketing your dental practice. Facebook demographics also tend to skew towards adult, female users, which is important to keep in mind when designing your social content.

Facebook allows for versatile posting, so you can upload anything from blog posts, links, photos, videos, GIFs, infographics, and so much more. A healthy mix of content is important for any business to succeed on social media.

Facebook also allows businesses to set up free business pages, which are customizable and can contain important information for patients. It’s important to make sure your dental practice’s hours, location, contact information, and name are all correctly listed on this profile.

Paid advertisements are also an option on Facebook, with a user-friendly interface. You can choose to “boost” your posts with a chosen budget over a set amount of days, and Facebook will do the rest. This action advertises your post(s) to a chosen audience, which can either be manually picked by you or automatically targeted by Facebook. This option is great for getting posts about promotions, specials, grand openings, etc. in front of prospective patients’ eyes.

#2. Instagram

Roughly 1 billion users scroll through Instagram per day, making it another important platform for dental marketers to build a presence on. Instagram is a visual-centered platform, with photos and videos as the main focus of any profile. This is a great platform to share high-quality photos and short videos with information about your dental practice.

Geared towards the 35 and under crowd, Instagram is best used by dental practices for branding purposes by posting quality, branded content. This platform is not meant for linking out to external content, but rather keeping patients engaged on your posts and profile.

You may consider sharing before and after images of cosmetic procedures, introduction videos of your staff and office tours, images of new equipment, and dental tips. Try to keep images and videos aesthetically pleasing to the eye while maintaining a clean and consistent branded look.

Instagram is actually part of Facebook, so you can link both accounts. Like Facebook, you can also “boost” posts and run paid advertisements that show on the news feeds of your targeted demographic(s).

#3. YouTube

Over 2 billion active users scroll through YouTube per day. While some do not think of YouTube as a social media channel, there are actually more daily active users than on Facebook.

YouTube is unique in that you can share any content posted on your account via hyperlinks and embed codes. Quality video content can attract patients and show that your practice is committed to being transparent and open about how dental procedures work and providing educational content.

Once a video is uploaded to YouTube, you can either share with a hyperlink or embed the video directly into a web page with a simple copy/paste code that YouTube supplies for every video.

Dental practices should consider producing video content like procedure information, educational content, office tours, equipment information, and more. Make sure to share your YouTube content via other social channels, like Facebook and Instagram, for maximum effect.

#4. Other Social Media Channels

Depending on your practice demographics and overall business goals, other social media platforms you may consider for your dental marketing efforts are LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest.

LinkedIn is mostly for business-to-business communications, which can be helpful if you are trying to network with other healthcare professionals in your area and generate more referrals.

Twitter is extremely popular, with 290.5 million active daily users, but it is meant for short, news-worthy posts. A successful Twitter presence will require several unique posts per day, if not more, which can be a massive undertaking for a dental practice.

TikTok has 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide and is rapidly growing. This platform is best for short videos, typically comedic or informational in tone. The typical user is either Gen Z or Millenial. This is a great way to test your creative and comedic side to potentially go “viral” and create buzz around your brand.

Final Thoughts

Starting and maintaining a robust social media presence across different platforms can be a daunting task. Social media presences should be updated daily in order to keep up with trends and increasing your online presence.

Without dedicated staff taking care of social media marketing, your dental practice could be losing out on visibility and attracting new patients every day.

For your dental practice’s social media marketing needs, consider hiring a digital marketing agency that will understand your needs and execute your vision. Having one agency working with all social platforms will also ensure consistency and maximum effectiveness with patient acquisition and quality content posting.

With a collective approach from digital marketing experts, your dental practice can grow its presence on social media while you and your staff keep the focus on your patients.