By Lucy McCarthy, Marketer at Hive Business.

To create a page for your dental practice you will need a personal account. To make your page great, you will need some key elements to build a clear picture of you, your practice and your offering.

CREATE YOUR PAGE

To begin, visit the create a page section on Facebook where, as a dental practice, you will need to select “local business or place”. The most relevant category for dentistry is “medical and health”. Enter your practice name and your page will appear.

COMPLETE THE BASIC INFORMATION

The about section on your Facebook page will give your followers your location, opening hours, business information/ bio and ways to contact you. When you enter this information about your practice be sure to double check it to ensure it is all accurate.

Of course, your Facebook page is not a substitute for a website – they have very different uses and you can’t solely rely on Facebook to deliver new patients each month. Facebook should encourage people to contact you or direct them to your website. Include a link to your website in the about section and on your Facebook posts.

CHECK IT’S ON BRAND

Your Facebook page needs to reflect your brand image and message. Maintaining a consistent look and feel will mean that your followers will easily recognise your practice when they come across it. If you have a logo, you should use it as your profile picture. You will also need to include a cover photo, keep in mind that people will see this on different platforms so it’s best to keep these eye catching yet simple. Consider using some good photographs of your beautiful practice or a nice team photo.

Here are the ideal dimensions for Facebook photos:

• Profile photo: 400 x 400 px
• Cover photo: 828 x 315 px
• Shared images: 1200 x 900 px

UNDERSTAND THE ADMIN PANEL

You can control who is able to post as your page, your page edits, your notification settings and insight reports using the admin panel. These are the sections on your Facebook page you should familiarise yourself with before you start posting:

1. Page: Click here to go back to your main page.
2. Messages: View and respond to direct messages not visible to other people.
3. Notifications: This will alert you to activity on your page, such as comments, post shares, post likes, and page likes.
4. Insights: View your page analytics on areas such as views, likes, engagement and other metrics, based on a specified date range.
5. Publishing Tools: Shows analytics on individual posts, such as how many people viewed each post and how many took an action.

To the right of these five tabs, you will see a Settings tab. Below are a few settings to take note of:

1. Edit Page: Allows you to amend the sections that appear on the left menu of your page. It’s good to review these every few months to make sure your information is up to date.
2. Notifications: Allows you to customise when and how you’d like to receive activity alerts. Such as; would you like to be notified when someone posts to your page and would you like to receive email notifications? We recommend you don’t switch off alerts so that you can stay on top of your page activity.
3. Page Roles: You can assign another administrator/ editor to manage your Facebook page. It’s important that your social media accounts are monitored daily and any comments or enquiries are dealt with promptly (within the same day). Whoever has access needs to be trusted to maintain your brand standards and we recommend that you are an administrator so that you always have full access.

CREATE CONTENT

We see lots of dental practices using Facebook, however many get caught up with how many likes and comments a post gets. Engagement is great but you need to make sure that your posts are sending the right message and letting people know about your services.

Create a content calendar to give yourself a guide to the posts that need to go out each week. Remember to keep a balance with your content, ensure you don’t bombard people with silly pictures from the practice but equally ensure your content is interesting for your followers. This could include:

• • A photo of a happy patient and a short testimonial.
  • A news article related to dentistry – there are often stories about sugar in the news! Or a local news story.
  • Useful information about oral health or a treatment that you offer.
  • Reminders about treatment presentations you’ve arranged.
  • Information about businesses you’ve teamed up with.
  • A link to one of your newly-published blog posts.
  • One of your practice videos.
  • A team members participation in a charity event.
  • Participation of national oral health events such as National Smile Day, Oral Cancer Awareness Month, etc. or any local events.

Photo’s and other images are a great way boost post engagement but make sure they aren’t gory – gruesome pictures of rotting teeth is one way to make people scroll faster! Use different types of media to showcase your knowledge, success stories and personality.

If you would like to find out more about our social media services call us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.