Everyone has heard of the wonders of using social media and most regular web users have probably had some interaction with businesses via social media. Most likely though this will have been with big multi-national corporations though and web based businesses such as e-commerce stores.
Many small businesses miss out on the benefits of Social Media and dentists are certainly one group who have a lot to gain.
If you have the same dentist for many years you build up some sort of relationship with them, Social Media is ideal for the kind of businesses where there is one main point of contact such as with a lawyer or an accountant: where you have a professional relationship and may be willing to interact or follow a person online; this certainly is the case for a dentist. SEO too can be improved with Social Media use.
If you want to improve your search engine rankings tweets and Facebook mentions and likes can actually give you a boost and Google are relying on these social factors increasingly to decide where to put websites in search results, Social Media then is an important part of dentist SEO strategies.
For a dentist SEO can bring in a lot of traffic to their site but traffic directly from Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter is important too and can be quite considerable. Social Media is increasingly used as a tool to discuss products and services and for people to get recommendations not just from close friends and relatives but from other acquaintances and co-workers.
If you are active on Social Media then it is very easy for one of your customers to reply to a friend looking for a dentist, ‘Try my dentist at The Valley Dental Practice’ and in Facebook this will become automatically clickable to get to your Facebook page if that customer has ‘liked’ you and in Twitter they can add in your Twitter name such as @valleydental which will link to your profile which can in turn link to your website.
As a dentist SEO may actually not be as good value as Social Media done well then, if many of your new customers come from referrals anyway then you are simply making it much easier to gain more referrals and these people once they come to your site are much more likely to become customers than someone referred by a search engine.
There still has to be a benefit for your existing customers mind you and try to remain active on social media so they don’t forget you are there and they can easily refer people to you, try adding news, competitions and maybe even organizing events such as networking for any of your customers who are business owners or free talks on dental hygiene and similar.