DENTAL PRACTICE MARKETING REALITY CHECK – BEWARE OF ALL OF THE HYPE ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Today, statistics show that social media remains the fastest means to reach a larger audience. This is particularly true because of the large number of users available on this websites. Record shows that websites like Facebook has well over 500 million users, You Tube gets more than 2 billion views every single day; the same can also be said about others like twitter and linked in. all these social media sites serves as a platform for reaching out a larger audience about your business. Today almost every single business is leveraging social media as part of their promotional effort in order to reach a larger audience. Even though there are such huge numbers on social media, It will be interesting to note that several questions have arisen by dental practitioners on the efficiency of social media for promoting dental marketing on whether the time, effort and money spent on establishing presence on networks such as Facebook, twitter, You Tube and LinkedIn are really worth it.
While some people argue that the online presence of dental practice in social media sites are actually worth the time, effort and money, others completely disagree saying that the attention and resources given to social media marketing in dental practice will not produce the much desired result. Each of this group has their focal points. Obviously, the argument of the first group of people is based on the fact that social media offers the needed platform to reach a very large audience. It is interesting that most of the people that belong to this first group are people who are in social media marketing business and are more interested in promoting social media as being very efficient for marketing dental practice without considering its limitations. However the second group argues that the effectiveness of social media is hyped and instead it should just be one of the several methods available for marketing dental practice. Below are some of the reasons you may want to agree with this.

Geographical Limitation

The fact that the social media have the big numbers and exposure has no impact or significance at a local business level. This is because even with the large numbers of users, a geographical limitation exist thus a local dental practice business will have patients basically from the region it operates. Time factor Apart from the effort and money needed in social media marketing of dental practice, a lot of time is usually consumed during conversations to maintain online presence which may not be healthy a business like dental practices.

Purpose

Though social media has large numbers of users, most of these people only visit the websites for the mere purpose of interacting with friends and family. It seldom happens that an individual will visit Facebook to seek medical attention on dental issues such as scaling or replacing a tooth (dentures).

Finding followers

Finding followers is not usually an easy task on social media. Attracting fans to any local business is usually very difficult especially when such business involves a service like dental practices. The prominent activity on any social media site is usually that of sending and receiving messages to friends and family, and meeting with new people.
In conclusion, just like the second group of people we considered, social media marketing should be considered as just one of the many ways to promote dental practices. Much of the effort and time should rather be spent on informing the local community about the existence and services of dental practices because it is more likely that individuals facing dental challenges, e.g scaling and dental issues, will seek advice and medication from the local environment.