We know how massive Facebook is and how businesses are leveraging its powers to gain traffic to their sites and convert traffic to profits. How would you like to amass the power of Facebook to draw patients to your dental clinic? Read on to learn the best practices uncovered just recently on several studies on online marketing research through Facebook.

Ensure you have a mobile site

Tech Crunch has just announced the not-quite surprising fact that Facebook is at a major shift towards going mobile. Get this: 78% of all Facebook users in the US—nearly 100 million people—log in to their Facebook accounts via their mobile devices.

In 2011, there were 49.3 million mobile phone Facebook users. In 2012, the figure almost doubled to 82.7 million. Mobile Facebook users are expected to reach 99.2 million this year and 115.2 million next year (2014). This upward trend will very likely continue as mobile is projected to seize 154 million users by the year 2017. Mobile users are defined as those who access their Facebook accounts through their mobile devices at least once a month.

Here are some tips to optimize the mobile Facebook page of your dental clinic:

• Take a look at the public view (not the admin view) of your clinic’s mobile page on Facebook. Do you like what you see? If you don’t, chances are your mobile users won’t either. Tweak your mobile page to make it more attractive.
• Highlight your best content by making it a pinned post. The mobile experience will not show your full timeline so you want the best content to be what mobile users will first see.
• The best-performing types of Facebook are photos. Therefore, use interesting, attractive and colorful photos in all your posts, ads and layouts.

Encourage your patients to check in on Facebook at your dental clinic

The check-ins and recommendations of your patient would appear first on the mobile devices of his Facebook friends, thus serving as an instant and powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool. (More on this later.)

Bank on your patients

Capture your patients’ contact information, get an email service and integrate them into your page. Constant reminder will help increase visits from patients. Also having a large database of patients will help in with any social media initiative you are planning.

Watch out for negative posts

Do not post too much as to come across as annoying. Aim for funny content with a mix of office humour. Hides will hurt you. Overly promotional posts get the cold shoulder on Facebook or worse, draw negative feedback. Sure, there may not be a dislike button on Facebook but users can do any of the following: Hide Posts, Hide All Posts, Unlike Page and worse, Report as Spam. Strive to be valuable, useful and interesting. Paid ads generally draw more negative feedback than organic or unpaid posts. This is because paid ads are generally perceived as promotional. However, paid ads do increase brand awareness because of their viral nature.

Hashtags do not work on Facebook

Why this is so is simply because Facebook is not Twitter. EdgeRank research shows that in order for your friends to share your posts, you must avoid using hashtags as they are now associated with lazy marketers’ tactics.

There is currently a Facebook page which calls itself “This is not Twitter. Hashtags don’t work here.” The 15,000 fans of this page argue that hashtags “interrupt the flow of communication” and often get abused by their users.

If you are doing Facebook ads, show photos

Facebook ads are shown to increase both organic and viral reach but reduce click-throughs. As stated earlier, Facebook ads elicit more negative feedback compared to unpaid posts. If you must run Facebook ads and hope to have your users click on them, remember to give them lots of images.

Invest in sponsored check-in stories

Sponsored check-in stories are ads for local businesses that show up in Facebook users’ news feeds. If you run this kind of ad and several of your patients check in on your dental clinic, those patients’ friends will automatically see the ad in their news feed.

Recent research shows that ads of this type get the highest click-through rate among all ad types. The following are the types of Facebook ads today:

• Application
• External Website Ad
• Event RSVP
• Inline Like
• Mobile App Install Ad
• Page Post
• Sponsored App Action Story
• Sponsored Page Like Story
• Sponsored Page Post Action Story
• Sponsored Page Post Like Story
• Sponsored Place Check-in Story

Sponsored Place Check-in Story tops the list of top-performing Facebook ads, generating a click-through rate (CTR) of 3.2 %. Trailing behind in the 2nd and 3rd places are the Sponsored Page Post Like Story with a CTR of 2.32% and the Sponsored Page Post Action Story which has a CTR of 2.13%.
The underlying principle can be explained this way: If you are planning to have some form of dental treatment and you happen to see in your Facebook news feed that one of your close friends just checked in to a certain dental clinic, you would most likely click through to that site. Most likely, you might even show up at the clinic itself.

For a free consultation on your dental marketing, give us a call at 1888-784-7878