Social Media for Dentists

The benefits of social media are generally highlighted towards helping small businesses and/or large firms grow their customer base and increase sales; however, it is often ignored that those not necessarily in the corporate realm can also make use of this powerful tool. One such example is dentists. Dentists' patients are online and it only makes sense that their practice be online also. A dentist's practice is different in the sense that it almost 100% thrives upon word of mouth referrals and what better way to do this than by creating a Facebook page or blogging about your services to better connect with your current patients. For instance, if one of your Facebook followers who is a current patient shares one of your posts with 200 of his other friends your reach has multiplied within seconds generating a viral effect. The more content that is created, the more likely it is that others will see it and then share it leading to others acknowledging you as an expert in dentistry and then perhaps seeking you for their dental health care.

5 Essential Tools for Businesses & Brands

1. HootSuite - a social media management system that allows the user to manage multiple networks at once such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress, Mixi and even MySpace. Inbuilt is a great scheduling system that allows you to set in advance an amount of posts for future sharing. An additional advantage is that analytics are also kept and given for businesses to use as they generate insight on their brands and services. 

2. AddThis - a social bookmarking service that can be integrated into a website with the use of a widget. Website visitors can bookmark items using Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Pinterest and Twitter. It is a great way to promote and boost engagement amongst brands and products.

3. PinReach - a Pinterest tool that helps view activity on your board by measuring impact and gauging success on your Pinterest pages. Its main purposes are to assess Pinterest marketing engagement and to identify new marketing and sales leads. 

4. Storify - a social media service that combines many parts of a story into one. For example, if you have a topic that is being discussed across different social media accounts, you can combine the information all into one spot so it can be read and shared easily in a narrative manner. 

5. YouTube's Audience Rentention Report. - This is listed by SocialMediaExaminer.com as the single most important social media marketing tool to come around in a many years. This tool gives information pinpointing on the time watched by viewers and prompt specific reactions. It also helps you see which audience your clips are reaching, monitor audience habits, so you can strategize and reach your target audience accordingly without wasting precious resources. 

Vine Now Available on Facebook & Twitter

Vine, Twitter's video sharing application, is now available for use on Facebook and Twitter. With the new IOS update, users of Vine are able to create video clips that are a maximum of 6 seconds long and then post them on various social networking platforms. Earlier brands saw much potential with Vine to use it as a video marketing solution but its limited functionality in terms of being able to share content on other sites did not provide much scope. However recently businesses can publish promotional material to their Vine accounts and develop unique campaigns, answer pressing questions, and hold contests via video in order to better connect with customers. This new platform shows promise in developing to be a perhaps more efficient alternative to YouTube.