Does your dental practice have Instagram? Are you keeping up with the marketing trends? It is essential if you want to stay ahead of the competition and expand your dental practice. As a dental practice it is an even better way to make that personal connection with your patients. We recognise in digital marketing more and more businesses are using and joining Instagram every day to build their brand image with videos and images, which are far more effective than Facebook or Twitter or any other social media platforms.
How can you promote yourself with Instagram?
We all know we love looking at what the celebrities are up to on their Instagram posts, what they look like, their clothes, hair and teeth! What latest treatment they have had. Let’s face it, we are nosey!
If we delve deeper, we know we can promote ourselves and use this clever app to grow our business let’s see how:
Hashtags
We love a hashtag but by placing it on our posts do you know what hashtags you should be using? Hashtags are actually Instagram’s sorting out process they will help reach a certain audience like dental patients. More importantly they help your audience find your result! So, make sure you add the right hashtags to your posts.
You need to make the hashtags relevant to you, the areas you want to target, the business you are in. You must always mix it up with the hashtags as well, don’t use the same ones for each post as you will be penalized by the algorithm. Always make sure your hashtags make sense as these hashtags will lead to high engagement and then you can watch your following grow.
Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags in a post or comment, which is way too much. If you use fewer with quality hashtags you will benefit more.
Private messaging
Hey! What a great way to communicate but you must make sure you are public and not private so you can show off your work and let followers know what you are offering. To send a new DM (Direct message) tap the + button in the top right corner and select Send Photo or Video, or Send Message. Once you’ve sent the message, you and the recipients can message back and forth
You can receive messages directly and send them back privately and start the conversation. If you do send a message to someone who doesn’t follow you it will be seen in your inbox. Always make sure you reply as soon as you can as it is good etiquette!
What Images to Post
To show and grow engagement, moving images are a great way to catch the eye with GIFs or Boomerangs showcasing your products and business and it looks good!
Photos – Instagram is a photo-sharing social media platform, so it’s important to share visually. With the photos posts that show before and after’s of your treatment it show’s great engagement. You can visually see the difference before and after like teeth whitening or the ever popular composite bonding. It speaks for themselves and will gain interest and you get to showcases your great work.
Videos are the best way to generate a stir with the engagement, you will usually receive more comments and likes. Video will give you that opportunity to showcase your team and your work telling a story and the viewer will want to follow that story and see the end result. An amazing smile, or a story about what’s happening In the practice and what you are offering
Stories
This is very popular as you can create engaging stories and capture your audience quickly. These photos and videos disappear 24 hours after they’re posted. On Instagram Stories, you can also post recorded videos, photos, live videos, boomerangs (these are videos that loop back and forth), basic text and music.
Reaching out
What do we think a good reach rate is? Depending on your following if you have a large following you may aim to reach an average reach rate of 15% for an Instagram post and 2% for an Instagram story. If you have a smaller following, brands you should aim to meet or exceed the higher benchmark of about 26% of their audience through posts and about 7-8% through stories.
Interacting with users
With any platform it is important to engage and interact with your followers on Instagram here is how you can do this:
Liking: To go and like a post is an easy way to connect with someone. To like a photo, either double tap the image or tap the heart button under the post.
Commenting: Next to the like button is a comment button – just tap it, and the app will take you to the comments page for that photo, you can add your comment there and start the conversation connecting with each other. Hit Post when it’s complete.
Mentioning: Like on Twitter, you can use the @ symbol to tag other users in your Instagram comments or post captions.
Tagging: You are able to add a tag before you post. To do this, tap Tag People before sharing your photo, and then tap where in the photo you want to add a tag. The app will then ask you to type in the person’s name to search for. When you have tagged the other users, you can share the image,
So after reading our Blog we ask the question again. Does your dental practice have Instagram? If not, you need to! As you do not want to miss out on some FREE advertising. It brings a wealth of opportunities to showcase your dental practice so don’t miss this opportunity for your business to grow. If you would like to explore further we are here for you Dental Marketing
