Tips & tricks to take your social-media profile to the next level

Content and platforms

A good social-media plan can help you stay connected with your community every day. It is important to define your target audiences and if you want to share material with both fellow professionals and patients, you may need to create separate profiles.

When you are sharing content specifically for your peers – such as clinical cases and new advances in research – you can create a profile with your own professional name, where your main followers will come from your professional network and from industry. This will allow you to share the quality of your clinical cases, the research you have been publishing, and will help to improve the referral of patients from your colleagues.

When your audience is patients, the profile should be your periodontal or dental practice, which will allow you to share simplified “before and after” clinical cases, the practice environment, and what happens backstage. The profile should always encourage patients to remain proactive in their dental care, remind them to make appointments, promote products and services, and consider providing material that might help to remove the fear and anxiety before a dental procedure. In your professional profile, remember to “tag” the practice where you perform your cases, and thus create a link between the two.

Different social-media platforms attract different type of patients and your marketing plan should focus on the channels that your audience is most likely to use. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are the most common platforms to create content for patients, and each has different features to help you to promote your practice or your clinical or research material. Instagram and Facebook can be synchronized, allowing you to post simultaneously on both, sharing content on two big platforms at the same time, attracting different audiences. Studies shows that Instagram’s audience main audience is between 18 and 34 years old while Facebook attracts a bigger percentage of age groups from 35 to 65 years old.

The video-sharing platform YouTube plays a huge role in the promotion of dental education. From dental procedures to theoretical classes and dental-congress promotions, a lot of material can be found on this platform, which gives you an opportunity to create a community of followers of your video content. YouTube also offers you the possibility of storing your videos and it is also integrated into other social-media platforms.