Sharing HIPAA Compliant Photos Boosts Your Online Presence
What’s the most important part of sharing a photo from your dental practice? Lighting? Composition? No — it’s WHO shared it and the effect that has on your marketing efforts.
Many practices post photos of their patients to their social media pages. Authentic and original patient photos are extremely important in building social proof and establishing your dental practice brand.
One additional to boost your digital marketing is to ask your patient to post the photo to their own social media accounts and tag your practice.
Do You Need A HIPAA Consent Form When Your Patients Post?
If a patient takes a photo in your office, posts it on their social media accounts, it’s not the dental practices responsibility. It’s only the dental practices responsibility when the practice posts photo’s of patients.
When a patient posts a photo there are several marketing advantages over your practice posting the photo:
- The patient’s friends and family who trust their recommendations will see it
- No HIPAA consent is required
- If your practice’s page doesn’t have many fans, a patient’s post will have better reach
- No additional cost to promote the post
Sharing HIPAA Compliant Photos Is One Of The Best Ways To Market
You’d be surprised at how many patients will share their experience online. All you have to do is give them the opportunity to do so.
As many of our client practices have discovered, your patients love to share about great experiences with local businesses and want to help your practice grow. Sharing a photo from their dental visit gives them an easy way to become advocates for your practice.
You might think “easier said than done,” but by applying a few simple techniques you can have patients sharing photos in no time. As with all social media efforts, you should assign at least one member of your team to improve patient experiences through photo sharing. Here’s what you can do:
- Use the patient’s phone to take the photo instead of your own.
- If you use your phone, text or email the photo to the patient immediately and encourage them to share it.
- Offer an incentive, such as entry into a prize drawing, for sharing the photo and tagging your practice.
- If you’re a My Social Practice client, simply use the HIPAA Complaint Photo Sharing App to accomplish all this in just a few taps! (The photos in this post were snapped and shared using the Publisher app.)
Tools for Turning Patients Into Advocates
We at My Social Practice have spent years honing our apps and tools to make sharing about your practice as easy and intuitive as possible for both patients and team members. Find out more about our dental social media marketing services and dental reputation management services.
About the Author: Adrian Lefler is a dental digital marketing expert and one of the founding members of My Social Practice. My Social Practice is a dental marketing services company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Adrian is passionate about helping dental practices grow. If you’d like to book Adrian 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 dental practices or our agile dental website development service, you can learn more here.
