social media Archives - Doctor, Dental SEO Consultant in Salt Lake City, UT

4 Essential Ways Social Media Can Help Your Practice

August 13, 2016 By Tyson Downs

One frequent question that I get from business owners is “How can social media help my practice?” That’s a valid question. If you don’t have much experience online, you may wonder how being on Twitter or Facebook can help you and your company. Seriously, does a dentist need to be on Twitter? Does a dentist/plastic surgeon/orthodontist, etc need to be on Facebook? Does a chiropractor need to use Google +? The answer to all those questions is YES. Let me explain….

1. Marketing Diversity

I am a firm believer that you don’t want to rely too heavily on one particular marketing strategy. I’ve seen companies go broke because they put all their eggs in the good ol’ Phone Book SEO Method. They put all their marketing spend in the phonebook. The same goes for somebody that focuses only on PPC ads. What happens when the competition gets fiercer and you are paying double for your ads? You better have more than one marketing method that you have built up so your business doesn’t take a hit.

2. Build Your Reputation

On the internet your reputation is everything. Everybody is reading reviews online before doing business with a company. What better way to earn the trust of your customers and potential customers than engaging with them and building up your reputation. By positive, engaging, witty updates you will be able to slowly build trust of potential customers and strength the relationship you have with your existing clients.

Before doing business with a company, it is common to ‘Google’ or search their name online, to see what is being said about them. If you have bad reviews out there, whether legitimate or not, they can put you in a world of hurt financially. Go ahead and Google my company Titan Web Agency. On the first page do you see all the social networking platforms listed? Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. These social networking sites can often bury bad reviews.

3. Promotions

Back in the day it would be common to have to plan your promotions a year in advance, especially with the phone book. With direct mail you need to do it months in advance. With social networking? A well thought out promotion can be planned over a weekend and up and active on Monday.

You can then split test promotions on Facebook vs. Google + to see which platform performs better. Now, if you have a small amount of followers, you probably will get next to no response to your promotion. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work though!

What it does mean though, is that you could benefit from reading my post about how a healthcare practice can get started with social media.

4. Direct Patient & Potential Patient Communication

How crazy is it that you can have a direct link to your patients and communicate with them visually within second’s right in their living room? Previously you would have to advertise on TV, and not many small businesses can afford that, now you can do it for free or next to free! Not only that, but customers can contact you directly and have an issue taken care of or potential lead contacted right away.

Even more exciting is 100% absolutely free text messaging directly to your patients. Do you own a dental office and you want to be able to send out specials to your patients? You can do it at no charge and begin implementing within a half an hour. Check it out, here’s what you do:

Step 1: Go to http://www.twitter.com and create an account for your business with the word ‘deal’ or ‘offers’ in the Twitter name. Make it easy to remember. If the business name is White Teeth, maybe your Twitter handle could be WhiteTeethDeals.

Step 2: Advertise the service to your patients. Talk to everybody that comes in. Post it throughout your location on professionally designed collateral.

An example of a call to action on the flier would be:

Text “Follow WhiteTeethDeals” to 40404 to become part of our VIP club and get special offers sent directly to your phone!

Then you, the business owner, would Tweet a special offer from that WhiteTeethDeals Twitter account and everybody that is subscribed would receive that Tweet via text message.

Example: We are having a referral party! Refer one patient and get a Sonicare Tooth Brush. Refer two? Drawing for Xbox!

BONUS: When you get a new subscriber, not only will the person get all future Tweets via text, but they will get the most recent one as well.

Your subscribers don’t even need be on Twitter to get these deals, because it is simply a text message service. How cool is that!

Here is more information on it from Twitter.

If you need help determining the best social media strategy for your practice, contact me, I can put together a plan that will get you on the map, improving your online presence, and bringing value to your business.

No longer is social media just for teens, social media is for every business that wants to grow.

Why You Need To Be On Social Media As A Small Business

June 7, 2016 By Tyson Downs

Social media is an online tool that is often underused by many healthcare professionals. Whether we are talking about Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Yelp or other online spaces with household names, doctors and other medical professionals can greatly benefit from building a social media strategy. If you are a local business owner, read on for some worthy tips.

Keep up an active Twitter account

You may or may not be a devotee of Twitter. Your practice should definitely have an account from which engaging posts are send out regularly. Twitter is its own universe and your local business should have a presence there. The best advice for a local business who tweets is to remember that you are speaking to members of your community. If there is an exciting event about to happen in your town, like a giant pumpkin growing contest, give it a shout out. Your followers will appreciate your local spirit.

Yes, You Need to be on Facebook

Facebook is kind of popular. We have all noticed this. Doctors, Dentists, and others in the industry need to build up a presence on Facebook. And, just as in the Twitter sphere, you should keep your content positive and locally focused. Create interesting posts about your business and your community will, over time, build up your fan base. At that point, social media will become a steady tool for your targeted promotion.

Remember that Facebook’s “Nearby” feature, for smart phones, lists local businesses that have been “liked” by a user’s friends. This method of presenting people with recommendations targeted specifically toward them is becoming popular, and is expected to grow.

Yelp

Yelp is a space where local businesses can find new customers. If a young woman moves to a new town, the likelihood is that she will check out Yelp before heading out for a cut and dye. Sure, there is the chance that you will get some bad reviews, but not if you are on top of your game. You should consider any negative Yelp comments as constructive feedback.

I mentioned three social media spaces that all local businesses should use as part of their overall online marketing strategy. And there are many more. A smart way to move forward is to speak with other local business owners in your community about the social media spaces that have worked well for them. Collaboration helps everyone, after all. Happy tweeting.

It may make sense for you to have a company manage your social media campaigns. If so, get in touch with me and we can determine a good course of action.

Your New B2B Social Media Connection Is Not A Sale

May 11, 2016 By Tyson Downs

B2Bs have a strange relationship with social media. The dynamic of utilizing social media from a B2B standpoint is much, much different from the ever-so-easy application of social media for B2Cs; B2Cs keep a steady relationship with their customer-base through social media– most of their social media contacts are already customers, and any interaction on the social media platform will just serve as a reminder for repeat business with that particular social media contact– easy to establish and even easier to maintain. B2B’s are quite different.

BROAD SPECTRUM CONVERSATIONS

Even if you do manage to get a social media contact as a B2B; posts and conversation with your followers is a much trickier game than “Here’s a coupon!”– in the B2B world; coupons and discounts are almost frowned upon as they’re generally seen as compromising the integrity of your product’s value; if a product or service is constantly discounted, almost no procurement-side of a business will see the value in it (some will; most won’t), and you could do damage to the market-integrity of your company that way.

Instead, B2B social media posts and conversation should be more broad-spectrum conversation; talk about the industry, any changes to the industry, or insights that your company has on how to make an outstanding product within that industry. These kinds of posts remind your social media contacts of the value and importance of your industry, while simultaneously supplanting the idea that your company is well-experienced and a solid participant of the value that your industry provides.

IMMEDIATE SALES?

However, even though that’s the best posting strategy for B2B’s, be mindful that a social media contact does not necessarily mean that you’re going to get a sale from that contact– and even if it does, those sales don’t come in immediately. Businesses are much more methodical about their purchases and won’t make an impulse-decision that has any significant impact at all on their budget. Instead it takes a long time to convince a business that your product provides necessary value for their company, or, having that social media contact can be a great way to be the first person they turn to when they have a problem that your industry can fix.

INTERACT

In general, it’s good to think of social media contacts as roughly analogous to exchanging business cards. Just because you have someone’s business card doesn’t mean you’re going to call them up the next day and order a shipment of their product without really understanding it, does it? No; that business card is there as a source of information, and when the condition arises for a need in that industry, that card is an information resource that you have. Social media is like that, but better, since you can keep up and interact with your potential clients with relative ease. This makes for a healthier B2B relationship in the instances where your social media contacts eventually do turn into clients some of your most reliable repeat-clients.

How Timing Can Drastically Impact Your Social Media Marketing

April 24, 2016 By Tyson Downs

Here’s something to contemplate: Oreo spent $4,000,000 on a thirty second SuperBowl commercial– you probably don’t; but you’ve probably heard about their “dunk in the dark tweet that went out during a 34 minute blackout. That tweet had tens of thousands of retweets and perhaps hundreds of mentions on online media the following day– and it was a tweet; so it was a non-expense for the company. The tweet itself wasn’t particularly good or funny on its own– what mattered was of course the context of the timing which made it so outstanding and gave Oreo plenty of value for its $0 investment in clever timing.

Greg Finn, social media expert made a comment on the “dunk in the dark” tweet:

The biggest thing is just being active. To be honest, that Oreo tweet was fairly lame. It wasn’t really funny, it didn’t really have to relate to Oreos (you could do a “you can sip/taste/try/talk/etc in the dark” for anything), and it wasn’t even that hard to do design-wise. The number one thing it had was that it was timely. If you have a team, make sure you’ll always have someone at the helm to take advantage of social friendly topics.

It’s all about context. A hugely overlooked and often misunderstood portion of the context of anything is the timing embedded in the context. Standup comedians will be able to tell you all about how important timing is. It’s not just the content of a post and its meaning– but when it’s posted, or said, or delivered, that determines such a huge portion of how it’s received by an audience. That’s what made Oreo’s tweet worth so much– the timing; not the content.

Timing is difficult to learn– it’s much more art than a science; and if you’re anything short of a god-gifted artist, then you’re probably better off just using what’s called evergreen content— which is content that’s literally timeless and still holds true and relevant to searches regardless of the time it’s read. However, you can’t ever fully close yourself off from in-the-now content that will pull in surges of viewers; you can easily keep up with hot-topic searches and stories in a process known as newsjacking which the savvier of brands have been taking advantage of in order to show off their marketing abilities. There’s been plenty of clever ways that brands such as Mercedes and Audi, Kraft, and PBS have stayed culturally relevant by commenting on events as they occur. This isn’t something that only big brands can take advantage of, either– when there are search terms that are trending, of course it’s quite easy for any given website to rearrange or publish some content that reflects the sentiment that that search term happens to be about.

Timing is all about keeping your brand part of the cultural zeitgeist– and social media and search engines are designed to optimize those sorts of things that are that kind of relevant.

The Benefits of Using Social Media to Build Rapport for Your Small Business

March 22, 2016 By Tyson Downs

As a small business owner, you strive to succeed and grow your business each day. You are your absolute best to increase market share by working at the marketing strategies that you feel most comfortable with. When it comes to online marketing, you know you need a website, that’s a given. You’ve heard a lot about social media and how it can help your business as well.

Well, with social media, it of course isn’t enough to set up your FB page add a couple pictures and say that you are ‘doing social media’. That will set you up for failure.

Let’s talk about some ways you can effectively build rapport and trust using social media platforms.

BE SEEN AS AN EXPERT

You want to be seen as an expert by your followers or fans. You want them to look to you as somebody that knows the industry inside and out. How do you do it? By offering creative s

olutions to problems that they might have. Come up with status updates showing how your product or service can enhance the quality of their life or make their everyday routines easier than they are now.

ADD VALUE

Give free information with nothing expected in return. The client will see you as somebody that isn’t just in it for the money, but somebody that enjoys what you do and enjoys helping people. Make each person feel valued and appreciated. This will encourage other clients or prospective clients to participate in your discussion.

CREATE A BUZZ

Offer a product or service that is so good, that is so high quality, which is so unique, that word starts to spread. That people actively search you out looking to work with you. Social media is the ideal place to do this because of how fast word of mouth works on these platforms.

HOLD EVENTS

You want to have interaction and encourage people to share your page and your photo’s, etc. Encourage this by having giveaways or other events. This will make your page livelier and as a result, your followers should go up, helping you in your search engine rankings.

I think at times we make social media a lot harder than it needs to be. It is all about interacting and engaging with our fans or followers to expand our online presence. If you follow the four steps above you will be light years ahead of most small businesses that are dabbling in social media. Above all, the most important thing to remember for your small business social media plan to be successful is to be consistent. So many of your competitors will start working on social media, but they won’t continue if they don’t see immediate results. Don’t give up, keep at it, even if you don’t get sales overnight.

Do you need help implementing a social media strategy? Want somebody to completely take over your social media? Let’s talk, I can help.