A Guest blog from Deploy Dental. The opinions expressed are from Deply Dental not Dr. Larry Emmott. However I believe it is valuable for dentists to get various takes on technology issues in order to make good technology choices. This is the third of a three part series on the value of Facebook. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

————————————————————–

6. Engage Current Patients

When someone has become a fan of your page, you have been given the invaluable ability to reach him or her directly.  To keep them engaged and reminded of your presence, it is important to provide them with information they will value such as industry news, interesting articles, patient testimonials, patient information, pictures (but not of clinical dentistry), and videos, as well as occasionally promoting yourself with updates on practice news or current specials/promotions that you’re offering.

7. Personal Connection

One of the most important aspects of gaining and retaining patients is building a personal connection.  When you post things like pictures, videos, or patient testimonials, you begin to build and reinforce this with both your current and prospective patients, perhaps before they even set foot inside your office.  You become more that just a dentist, you become THEIR dentist, who they know and respect.  Furthermore, Facebook gives you the rare opportunity to share more than just your professional side.  Mentioning things such as favorite movies, concerts you’ve seen, your favorite musicians, and sports teams allows patients see you as a person, not just a dentist.

8. Community

Facebook also gives you the chance to become a participant in the local community.  Find other local businesses with which you’ve had great experiences, and that your fans are ‘Liking’, and create some conversation about them.  Facebook is also a great way to connect with other professionals with which you do business.  If you have a favorite dental lab, or specialists like an oral surgeon or periodontist, give them some credit for the good work they’ve done and mention them in a post.  Any recommendation in return may result in new patients.

Editors note: It is quite possible for a dentist to set up a social media program, including Facebook, by him or herself. On the other hand you may find it valuable to use a service to help set it up and maintain it. In addition to Deploy Dental  the following vendors can help with setting up your social media presence.

Sesame Communications: Sesame is my favorite and a sponsor of EOT. They are currently offering 365 days of free Facebook content; just send a request to emmott@sesamecommunications.com

DoctorBase: I have not worked directly with these people but we have talked on the phone and I like their approach. They also have a great blog.

From a Chicago Tribune article:

What’s lost in a digital format, he explains, is an irreplaceable need to “be known” through intimate contact via voice inflections, gestures, facial expressions, touch — even silences. To him that kind of communication is as essential to humans as food.

via Face time vs. Facebook – Chicago Tribune.

The article makes the convincing case that face to face human contact is essential to effective communication. As amazing as Facebook and other e-media are they are simply not the same as being there.

Just as a live football game in the stadium is different than watching it on TV which is still different from reading about it. All have value, all convey the facts of the game but each conveys a different essence of the game.

Facebook is OK to keep your name and presence top of mind with a patient but comes nowhere near being as important as our one on one conversations chairside.

Webinars and online shopping are great uses of Internet technology but will not replace actual trade shows and conferences any time soon.

As people, we are not just looking for information we are looking for interaction.

A Guest blog from Deploy Dental. The opinions expressed are from Deply Dental not Dr. Larry Emmott. However I believe it is valuable for dentists to get various takes on technology issues in order to make good technology choices. This is the second of a three part series on the value of Facebook. Part 1 is here.

_______________________________________

4. Gaining New Patients

The Internet in general is the fastest growing source for new patients.  Statistics show a large segment of that is coming from Facebook.  In a recent poll of 23,000 Americans, 16% used social media as a source for health care information, with 94% of those people choosing Facebook as their primary source². One surprising aspect was that the average age of respondents was 41 years old.  We would infer from this poll that using Facebook as a means to find and connect with health care providers is becoming more mainstream among even older Americans, and in the coming year it will be even more important for these providers, such as dentists, to increase their presence and participation on Facebook.  These statistics directly correlate to new patients, because, whenever a current patient becomes a fan of your page and clicks the ‘Like’ button, a notification is placed on their wall where all their friends can see it.  In today’s modern world when it is often quipped that ‘Nobody talks to each other anymore’, this is becoming the new word of mouth advertising.  There is almost no higher recommendation you can receive.

5. The Growing ‘Viral’ Aspect

The viral aspect of Facebook is one of the most powerful examples of reaching large amounts of people quickly.  If one fan ‘Likes’ a post, then you are instantly exposed to all their friends.  If two of those friends like it as well, then you are growing at an exponential rate.  Since the average Facebook user has 140 friends, you can very quickly be reaching thousands of people in only a few clicks.  This is not to imply that any of this is a given, only to demonstrate the potential ‘reach’ of your Facebook Page.  It still takes a lot of hard work, and it is the dentist’s responsibility to create the valued content that encourages their fans to take the action of ‘Liking’ or ‘Reposting’.

Part 3 will examine:

6.    Engage Current Patients

7.    Personal Connection

8.    Community

Editors note: It is quite possible for a dentist to set up a social media program, including Facebook, by him or herself. On the other hand you may find it valuable to use a service to help set it up and maintain it. In addition to Deploy Dental  the following vendors can help with setting up your social media presence.

Sesame Communications: Sesame is my favorite and a sponsor of EOT. They are currently offering 365 days of free Facebook content; just send a request to emmott@sesamecommunications.com

DoctorBase: I have not worked directly with these people but we have talked on the phone and I like their approach. They also have a great blog.

A Guest blog from Deploy Dental. The opinions expressed are from Deply Dental not Dr. Larry Emmott. However I believe it is valuable for dentists to get various takes on technology issues in order to make good technology choices. This is the first of a three part series on the value of Facebook.

——————————————————–

Is it really necessary for a dentist to be on Facebook?  Well, in recent years Facebook has surpassed Google as the most viewed site on the entire Internet, and a staggering 75% of all Internet users in the United States are on Facebook¹. Your current patients simply expect you to be there, and it gives you the chance to connect with them through a media they already use. Below are some benefits you can realize by having a Facebook page for your practice

1.    Free Advertising

It should be stated that while it may be ‘free’, there is a lot of time and hard work that goes into creating and maintaining a successful Facebook campaign.  But, what other medium can you think of that asks only for your participation in exchange for potentially tens of thousands of dollars in business?  This is why Facebook is such a valuable resource for all businesses, including dentistry.

2.    Reputation and Brand Mangement

When people perform searches for a specific dentist or practice’s name, the Facebook page itself will often be one of the top results. This is a valuable avenue through which potential patients will find you, and many people will prefer seeing what others in the community are saying (as well as seeing your online interaction on Facebook) before visiting your personal site.  This is also crucial because, unlike Google Reviews or Yelp, Facebook allows you to monitor and control what is being said about you, so you can delete hurtful or misleading comments and even ban problem users.

3.    A More Effective Method

The average user spends more than an hour per day on Facebook, which is vastly more than any other website.  So, any time you can keep them on Facebook, users will be much more likely to stay engaged than say, linking to your own website.  That is why one of the most valuable aspects of a Facebook Fan Page it the ability to create your own ‘tabs.’ A tab refers to the icons located on the left-hand side of your Fan Page underneath your profile graphic, most commonly ‘Wall’, ‘Info’, ‘Photos’ and so on. A more complex tab could even include an entire micro-website, all within your Facebook Fan Page.  Fans can get all your crucial information without clicking through to your website.

Parts 2 and 3 will examine:

4.    Gaining New Patients

5.    The Growing ‘Viral’ Aspect

6.    Engage Current Patients

7.    Personal Connection

8.    Community

Editors note: It is quite possible for a dentist to set up a social media program, including Facebook, by him or herself. On the other hand you may find it valuable to use a service to help set it up and maintain it. In addition to Deploy Dental  the following vendors can help with setting up your social media presence.

Sesame Communications: Sesame is my favorite and a sponsor of EOT. They are currently offering 365 days of free Facebook content; just send a request to emmott@sesamecommunications.com

DoctorBase: I have not worked directly with these people but we have talked on the phone and I like their approach. They also have a great blog.

It is not nearly enough to just have a practice Facebook page. In order for it to be valuable and for patients become engaged you need to provide interesting and relevant content on a regular basis. That is the hard part.

Sesame Communications has developed a years worth of content, 365 Days, that they are offering to dentists at no charge. Just send a request to emmott@sesamecommunications.com

The Buzz: Social media is trending down and of no use to your business.
The Anti-Buzz: It is still be a good tool and will undoubtedly be more so in the future.

Once again we are abuzz about social media and its use for you, the dentist and so I thought I would weigh in again, as time has granted all of us a bit more wisdom since last time. It is a tricky topic because nobody doubts that you need some sort of web presence, and sites like Yelp have reinforced the notion that the Internet is a strong word-of-mouth vector, yet the prospects of a dentist becoming the hippest thing on Facebook are grim enough that you couldn’t be blamed for not trying. However, in the spirit of it’s-still-January-and-I’m-looking-to-the-future I would urge caution against complacency: You never know when social media will become necessary for your practice. We’ve seen the rise and fall of MySpace and yet the mistake we’re all still making is that we talk about social media and Facebook as if they were the same thing. You should know how this works by now: things will change.

First, the bad news. The bad news for social media is that it is a burst bubble. The influx of new users is waning, and many upstart social media companies are failing, expected to fail, or considered overvalued. Don’t let this trick you into dismissing social media as some silly “fad” – this would be like dismissing the personal computer in 1985 because it wasn’t ready for dental-practice-prime-time.

The bad news for you is that social media isn’t exactly dentist friendly anyway. Yelp and similar sites are great for consumers in that they provide a source of reviews, and when the small business in question is a restaurant or hobby shop, there is usually a “personality” that can be well-represented in other contexts like Facebook Fan Pages or twitter-feeds-that-actually-have-followers. However, a dental practice, aside from your own web page, is likely to only be well-represented in these review-site contexts, and unfortunately these are contexts where you have little control. In places where you have control, (Facebook), gaining followers is an uphill battle.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that social media has given you many powerful tools and you should embrace them, (this is more or less what was advocated here and I understand Deploy Dental will be offering more advice soon: take it). There is no doubt you need some web presence; not having a web page for your practice is like volunteering to be removed from the Yellow Pages. So while your Facebook Fan Page might not draw a lot of interest, these social sites have provided you with a platform for hosting the resources you need to share with your customers. Your site should want a list of announcements, especially if you are the sort to make special offers. This can be a twitter feed, and embedded into your site. Have an informative video? Host it on YouTube. A slide show of images? Flickr or Photobucket. An interactive presentation that lets patients explore your practice? You know I love Prezi. The mistake thus far has been that we have asked what social media does for us. Turns out the appropriate question was: what can you do with it?

And what about the future? Even while the immediate value of existing outlets might be questionable, social media, despite hitting an economic plateau, is indicative of how a lot of humans want to interact with each other now. That change has already happened. It’s done. The decision has been made. What gets lost in the jealous buzz of who likes what network and why and how much money gets shuttled where is that social media the idea has brought an enormous number of  people to the Internet, and for many people it is their home base for their “Internet Day.” Not everybody surfs Facebook during lunch, (I don’t), and for many the novelty of social media wears off after a few months, but it is still the paradigm that defines how the average person interacts with the Internet. Eventually you are going to have to adjust for this, even if today is not the day and 2012 is not the year.

Consider Fitocracy, a newer social media site built around the idea of users sharing their fitness routines with each other. There are a number of things this site does well, most especially that people tend to stick to their workout schedules when they feel like their friends are watching. The idea of specialized social networks should make you perk up. You might not ever leverage the 70 trillion Facebook users out there, but as an example imagine a smaller network devoted to healthy lifestyle – we’ll call it HealthBrag – where people track the contents of their fridge, store and share recipes, share pictures of what they cook and eat because it is so much better than what their friends cook and eat, and provide links to their doctor, yoga instructor and dentist. Suddenly all the cool dentists are on HealthBrag and if you’re still fumbling with how all of this works, you’ll be left behind.

Following is an excerpt from my Dentrix Magazine Article.

You can find an article I wrote for Dentrix Magazine online here, page 28.

The article discusses what to do, or more importantly what not to do when you are faced with a negative online user review.

The following is a guest blog from Deploy Dental a dental social media servcie

Social Media marketing is one of the most recent forms of Internet marketing to emerge in the last few years. Staying on top of the rising tidal-wave of new technology and mountain of new information is not easy. Now-a-days every dental office will need to establish some sort of social presence if they want to connect with the younger demographic along with adding an immense amount of value to your practice. We have come up with 6 ways for dentists to leverage social media by connecting with their fans and followers.

1. Social discount sites

Now-a-days there are websites like Groupon and Living Social that allow your dental practice to sell one-time promotions where you offer a popular dental service at a remarkably low price (50% off +) expecting to sell very large quantities. Your deal gets distributed to all of these social discount sites’ subscribers, generally tens-of-thousands in your local area who are given a time and quantity window in which they are to purchase the discount. (ie. your teeth whitening offer might go for 3 days or until 500 units have sold). The way that these websites handle the monetary end is unique too. They act as the payment processor and as part of the deal with them they will take their cut (30% – 50%) of the sales and send you a check for the rest. These kinds of deals need to be thought out. If a nearby competitor has just sent out a deal for teeth whitening, either hold off for a while or run the deal on a different service, deals can be exhausted if the users are presented the same deal too frequently.

2. Time-sensitive promotions

Different times of the year call for different dental promotions. For instance, when children get out of school for the summer and are on winter break it would be a good time to run a wisdom teeth extraction campaign. Towards the end of October is the time where you want to start reminding your current patients that they should schedule a visit before the end of the year so they don’t waste any of their dental benefits that expire at the end of the year on December 31.

3. Pictures

Make sure to post photos of your office along with any practice videos that you might have. Everybody knows the first thing someone does when they arrive onto your Facebook Fan Page is look at your pictures. Make sure to only upload photos that are clear and appropriate for the workplace. Your patients and potential patients want to see what goes on in their dental office. Think of it as your own slice of reality television, more appropriately reality social media.

4. Videos

To take advantage of websites like YouTube and Vimeo users are encouraged to upload videos of their own. In a dental office this can sometimes be quite a task of creating a video that you would feel proud broadcasting to the world. Just because you don’t have any videos of your own doesn’t mean you still can take advantage of these sites, we encourage all of our clients to post comments, favorite, share and add friends using these social video sharing websites. If you want to start shooting video in your dental office we recommend starting off with the Flip Video, $79.99 Digital Video Camera.

5. Patient education

It is important to not forget about the reason why people come to the dental office, to get dental procedures taken care of. A dental social media must is to have procedural descriptions on your website/blog so when people have a question about a specific procedure they can reference your services page alleviating the need for the visitor to call your practice and use valuable front-office time.

6. Patient retention

Maintaining your current patient-base isn’t always easy. One way to make sure you are taking full advantage of social media is by leveraging different technologies that allow your to communicate with your current patients and answer any questions that they might have. A practice newsletter is one of the ways of accomplishing this. Send out a quarterly newsletter to your patients letting them know about any new things going on in the office, events coming up, or even new staff members/technology.

From an article Too Much Buzz from the economist.

Two billion people are already online. E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, this more “social” element to the internet is the next great revolution. Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of “empowerment” and “transparency”. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it a new bubble in the making?

via Schumpeter: Too much buzz | The Economist.

A good analysis that looks at both extreme ends of the social media debate. On one end it is a fundamental societal revolution that will alter our very existence. On the other it is an ever so trendy waste of time that will pop into nothingness.

Of course, as is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in between. I am in awe of Facebook. 800 million users. On the other hand, as the article points out, using social media effectively is neither easy nor inexpensive.

For now I believe dentists need to be aware of Facebook and the other social media platforms. If you are nerdish, setting up an office Facebook or twitter account is not a bad idea. Or you can pay someone to do it for you. However I do not believe it is urgent or if you do not use Facebook immediately you will be left out or miss out on amazing new profits.

I would not be surprised if social media as we know it now is in fact a bubble that will pop.