When you peer into your practice’s waiting room, you’ll likely see many patients hunched over their phones, checking their favorite social media platforms. 

Sometimes business owners want to jump on every social media platform – because that’s where their customers are. But it’s important to remember that while social media can be a powerful marketing tool, it also takes time and resources.

Before starting or reengaging on social platforms for your dental practice, here are a few areas to think about.

Decide what platforms are most important to you and your audiences. You want to reach your existing patients and potential patients where they spend their time online. When you have limited time and resources to spend on maintaining your social platforms, quality is definitely better than quantity. Decide where to focus your efforts and stop wasting time on the platforms that won’t move the needle.

Define roles and approval structure. Decide who on your team will be responsible for creating your practice’s social content, and then determine who will proof and approve the content before it is published to your social platforms. Clearly outlining roles and responsibilities gives a layer of accountability to your social strategy.

Work with your staff to develop content bins. Content bins are the categories of content that you want to post about on a regular basis. This downloadable resource will help you to develop and define content bins for your practice, then determine how frequently you want to post about each content bin. Be realistic about what you or your team can handle. This document will give direction to those developing your social content and ensure that your whole team is on the same page. Here are some examples of content bins to get you started: research/studies (dental technology, patient care, etc.), dental trends, healthy dental habits, practice news and staff profiles.

Now that you’ve taken care of the basic pieces of your practice’s social media strategy, you can start thinking about creating a social media process for your team to follow.

If your practice is on social media, you should have a clearly defined social media process that is reevaluated each quarter. The process outlined below is meant to serve as a starting point. Consider it a checklist for delegating tasks to your team. Ultimately, each business’ social media process will be different. 

Daily - Monitor for incoming reviews/messages and respond where appropriate. This can be done multiple times throughout the day, depending on your resources. - Estimated time 5-10 minutes.

Capture any real-time content happening (example: take pictures of the new piece of equipment being delivered, or the celebration of a work anniversary). This content could either be shared in real time to your practice's social channels or saved for a later date. - Estimated time 5 minutes. 

Weekly - Identify/plan the pieces of content to share for the next week, use content bins to guide what is being shared on your platforms. - Estimated time 10-15 minutes.

Once the content you want to share has been identified, follow the approval structure that has been identified, and schedule the content using the in-platform tools or free tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Helpful links: how to schedule posts on Facebook, how to schedule posts on Twitter. - Estimated time 10-15 minutes. 

Sprinkle in unplanned posts that fit into your content bins and are timely in nature, when necessary. This won’t happen every week, but don’t be afraid to swap out a scheduled post with something that is more relevant or timely than what was planned. Example: newly released reports or studies in the news that are related to dental health, your interview about brushing correctly on the local news, a therapy dog’s visit to your office, etc. - Estimated time 5 minutes. 

Monthly - Tally/track the number of negative and positive reviews for the month across various social platforms and website. - Estimated time 5-10 minutes.

Identify big content opportunities happening in the next month. Mark these events in your calendar so that you don’t forget to capture them. - Estimated time 5 minutes. 

Quarterly - Refine your social media process. For example: you might find that it is unnecessary to check for reviews daily. Making that activity a weekly or monthly function might work better for your practice. - Estimated time 30 minutes. 

Annually - Review who has access to the pages and remove/add people as you see fit. - Estimated time 5 minutes. 

Take the time to research tools that could help further streamline your process. - Estimated time 30 minutes to one hour. 

Half the battle of having social media presence for your practice is being active on a consistent basis and developing a workable process that helps you accomplish goals. The good news is that creating and sharing social media content that bolsters awareness of your practice doesn’t have to be a full-time job. 

Editor's Note: Kelsey Leavey is a public relations and social media specialist at The Hodges Partnership. She can be contacted at kleavey@hodgespart.com.