How to get your staff involved with social media
Most dental practices look back at us in horror when we suggest that they should be posting on social media once per day at a minimum on Facebook and twitter- not to mention multiple times per week on pinterest, google+ oh and a monthly blog too!
However, if you get the right processes in order within your dental practice, generating content for your social media pages shouldn’t be as difficult as it sounds.
- Create a team structure:
When embarking on social media it’s important to create clear roles within your practice and communicate who is responsible for what. For example, your practice manager could be your co-ordinator and other staff members the contributors.
Coordinator
The coordinator’s job is to identify major topics that your patients care about, and to make a master list of how all of these topics can be grouped together.
For example:
- Intellectual Leadership- courses/articles/blogs
- Special Offers/ Incentives
- Available appointments
- Team info- birthdays/ babies/ retirements
- Fun stuff- cartoons/ quotes/ infographics
- Unique Selling Points- late opening/ free parking
- Finance info- denplan/ 0% finance
Next, match these topics to the contributors in your practice so that they collect and submit content they naturally run into. Choose contributors from the departments who can best deliver the content you’re looking for.
What matters at this point is quantity. Ask specific people for specific amounts of content on designated topics within set timeframes.
Contributors:
Contributors help you generate a diverse flow of all things sharable. As you assemble contributors, remember to look beyond your management team. Accessing more cross-discipline sources means you’ll have more content to choose from.
- Evaluate Content for Fit
It’s important that the content you share on social media stands out. For this, your selection process needs some criteria. Here are three factors to help you comb through the curated content to select strong, relevant content to share.
Voice
Shared content should align your voice with your practices’s values, morals, and ethos. Be sure what you write reflects your voice, whether it’s playful, conversational or formal.
Value
When sharing content, quality trumps quantity. Before you click Publish ask yourself a few questions to make sure the content has value for your audience. Would your patient’s thank you for this post? Does it pass the Facebook test of what the real people in your life would love? Would you email it to a friend?
If the content you’ve reviewed passes those tests, don’t simply share it. The real value of social media comes when you comment on the content, highlighting the key points
Humanity
The ultimate goal of social media for dental practices (just like everything else you do) is patients taking up treatments. But don’t let bottom-line thinking cloud your selection process. Social media is meant to be human. And this is precisely why it’s vital to develop a collaborative approach to selecting content to share.
Sharing other people’s content on social media helps you appear less self-absorbed. A great rule of thumb is to use the 80/20 ratio for posting content. Simply put, 80% should be fun and practice related and 20% should be informative/ salesy.
Having a large pool of shareable content will help immensely in the selection process. Bear in mind that relevancy trumps recency; newer isn’t necessarily better. This means that being a high-quality source of social curation is essential to becoming both trustworthy and follow-worthy.
If you would like some training in how your dental practice can use social media to the fullest, speak to a member of our team who will be happy to visit your practice and teach your team!
Thanks to Social Media Examiner for the inspiration for this post
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