Are the new algorithm changes good or bad for your practice? It depends on the relationships you’re cultivating with your patients and prospective new patients.
Relationship-Based Businesses, Like Your Practice, Will Benefit
As we’ve said before, dollar for marketing dollar Facebook is still one of the very best practice marketing values around. And now, for relationship-based businesses like your practice, it’s going to get even better.
Less Clutter Means Less Frustration For Your Patients
Facebook is cracking down on what they’re calling “overly-promotional” posts and limiting the visibility of those kinds of posts in your patients’ and prospective patients’ news feeds. They’re doing this for two reasons…
First, Facebook’s goal is to continue to provide people with the kind of content that they want in their news feeds. That’s how they get people to spend time there—by keeping them happy. People don’t like being bombarded by posts from businesses they don’t have relationships with, constantly trying to sell them stuff! In addition, Facebook users don’t like excessive numbers of posts that push them to enter contests and promotions without providing any real context or purpose-driven value.
And obviously, Facebook’s second objective here is to move businesses toward doing more advertising and boosting to get their messages out resulting in increased revenue for Facebook.
The Great News: You’re Already Posting The Right Mix
By using the content we send you each day in your Client Daily Kickstart email, you’re doing exactly what’s right… Posting things that purposefully do one or more of these 6 things:
- Engages
- Provides Value
- Shares Practice Culture
- Boosts Practice Clout
- Demonstrates Passion
- Strengthens Relationships
We’re Modifying Images To Leverage These Changes
You may have already noticed… Over the last several months we’ve been moving our Client Daily Kickstart email content and blog post images toward much simpler layouts with less text and more “organic feeling” imagery. That’s because research indicates these images have more stopping power. They look more like they belong in the news feed and at first glance look less like they came from a business. And, by the way, that’s true! You’re NOT a business trying to sell something. You’re their trusted, lifelong health partner.
Don’t Be Shy About Boosting Posts
We continue to encourage our clients to earmark a small budget each month for boosting their Facebook posts. Even amounts as small as $3, $5, or $10 can often skyrocket reach. Also, occasionally when you run a promotion of some kind, don’t be afraid to significantly increase that budget. We recently had a dental client who spent $5,000 in one month boosting their practice’s Invisalign posts on Facebook. The result was nearly $250,000 in new Invisalign case production.
Is YOUR Practice Ready To Become A Social Practice?
We empower dental, orthodontic, and eye care practices to achieve the benefits of effective social media marketing in 10 minutes a day through creative content and consistent support.
We do that in 3 ways:
1. When You Participate, You’re Effective – Participation is what makes practice social media marketing effective. We provide the in-practice printed materials and online tools you need.
2. Creative, Awesome Content – Content that engages, provides value, and strengthens relationships gets shared. We help you do that—without taking over your “practice voice”.
3. Consistency Ensures Success – When it’s fast and easy you become consistent—without spending a lot of time. We make that possible and affordable. You need not do it alone!
Top image by Flickr user Ricky Lai used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license. Image cropped and modified from original.
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Ready To Begin Finding Dental Patients with Digital Dental Marketing?
About the Author: Jack Hadley is a dental marketing expert and one of the founding members of My Social Practice. My Social Practice is a digital dental marketing company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Jack is passionate about helping dental practices grow. If you’d like to book Jack or one of the other members of My Social Practice’s speaking team, you can do that HERE. Interested in learning more about the benefits of SEO for dentists, our dental websites service? Learn More Here.
