By Julie Frey
It’s become increasingly common for dentists to use social media for dental marketing. A survey by The Wealthy Dentist showed that half of dentists have Facebook accounts for their dental practices.
But setting up a professional-looking Facebook profile isn’t easy. Between adding graphics and using developer tools, creating pages and building links, there’s a lot to do… and a lot of ways to go wrong.
But what if it was easy? What if your dental practice could have a Facebook presence that seamlessly integrates with your website?
IDA’s New Patient Marketing Machine is fully compatible with Facebook. You can have a Facebook profile that is totally consistent with your website – from graphics and branding to services and contact information.
Visitors navigate a version of your website within your Facebook profile. If you change the graphics or information on your website, your profile will be automatically updated as well.
If your dental practice doesn’t have a Facebook account, you might want to set one up. Remember to set this up as a separate account from your personal profile.
Your practice’s Facebook presence begins when you create a local business page for your office. Then, you can flesh out your profile with photos, website links, and additional information. You can even ask your patients to “Like” you on Facebook.
With your IDA New Patient Marketing Machine, each of your web portals includes pre-built pages that you can add to your Facebook profile to create a richer, more useful experience for your visitors.
Facebook lets you add more pages to your profile by using an app that creates with Facebook Tab Pages. These pages include a wealth of information about your practice, including your dental markets, your doctors’ profiles, your map and hours, links to make appointments, etc. Plus, all this information is pulled from the data you have already entered in your Control Panel. All you need to do is hook them up.
There are five pages from your IDA web marketing portal that you can include as tabs within your Facebook social networking profile. These pages are the Homepage, the Meet the Doctor page, the What We Offer page, the Map and Hours page, and the Appointments page.
Once you add these pages, they’ll show up in the left-hand menu navigation of your profile. Click on one of these icons, and you’ll see that page of your IDA website – displayed within your Facebook profile. Pretty slick, huh?
These Facebook tab pages stay linked to your IDA New Patient Control Panel. Anytime you make changes – whether it’s to your page design, doctors, practice information, or anything else – these Facebook tab pages will be automatically and instantly updated.
If you or someone on your team is comfortable with Facebook, you can set this up yourself, or one of our Internet Dental Alliance team members can do it for you as part of your New Patient Marketing Machine.
Once your Facebook tab pages are set up, they update automatically, increase your web visibility, and keep attracting new patients to your dental practice.
