5 Social Media Apps for Dental Practice Marketing

Over the past several years, many business owners have begun to realize the importance of establishing a social media presence as a way to promote their services and ensure customer satisfaction. The Pew Research Center notes that about three-quarters of online adults use Facebook alone, and people are increasingly likely to use apps to communicate. If you want to keep up with them, you have to tailor your practice to accommodate the changing nature of marketing in a social media environment. These five social media apps help you to create content, prepare posts, interact with patients, and effectively manage your practice’s online reputation.

Dental Anywhere

At times, especially when life gets hectic, you may wish that your practice had its own personalized app to communicate with patients to let them know about upcoming specials or important news about your practice, or for them to contact you about appointments or payment. Dental Anywhere aims to give this to you through an app that patients can download and use to communicate with your dental practice. Depending on the package you choose, you can take advantage of:

• One-touch appointment requests
• Integration with PayPal
• Push notifications
• Social media integration
• App activity monitor, and more

The developers of Dental Anywhere chose to create an app rather than a mobile site or a desktop site, based on the fact that mobile sites can be notoriously slow and an app is quicker since it is not restricted by the browser’s limitations. They also recognized that patients are increasingly likely to access your information on-the-go via their smartphones rather than wait until they are in front of a computer.

Edgar

One of the biggest problems businesses face in managing their social media presence is timing. You can select the best time of day to post a Facebook link to your blog post, but only a portion of your patients are on the platform at that time. Edgar recognizes that you may need to share blog posts, specials, or other relevant content more than once a day, week, or even month. With Edgar, you can create your own library of content to share on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You specify the frequency at which Edgar posts to the content to your social media accounts, and the app takes care of the actual posting.

My Social Practice

After you get your social media accounts and blog organized, you may quickly realize that you need to populate them with valuable content. My Social Practice addresses and fixes some of the common issues surrounding dental practice marketing to make them much less of a hassle for you. With the My Social Practice app, you can select content to share from a variety of sources, including its own content library. You get:

• One-click sharing on multiple platforms
• Post scheduling
• Photo sharing
• Custom graphic capability, among other features

You can also personalize the content you choose to better relate to your patients and your service area.

Social Dental

One of the best ways to get your dental practice’s name out there is by “word of mouth” or in the cyber world, social shares by your patients. When you post pictures of patient families at your office and share those pictures on social media, those postings get shared with the friends and families of your patients, and hence, you get your name out there. However, you must go through the rigmarole of getting their permission first. Social Dental uses what it calls SmartShare™ technology to allow your patients to take pictures and sign an electronic media release to allow you to share the pictures immediately. Each photo also prompts the patients to complete a review of your practice, which is then posted to review sites like Yelp.

Tagboard

While many apps are designed to help you manage your various social media accounts, most do not give you the ability to tailor your management to a specific social media campaign. Tagboard allows you to do just this. You may come up with an excellent hashtag that you and your patients can use to draw attention to your practice. Tagboard creates a streamlined system that puts all the activity in one social media campaign at your fingertips. You can design multiple tag boards for different campaigns, and you can also moderate the content that shows up on Tagboard’s website.

Your patients are eager to interact with you, and they will take the opportunity if you give it to them. With these applications for social media, your dental practice has greater reach for new patients, more useful content for readers, and better overall management of your social media accounts.