How to Use Automation to Scale Up Your Cosmetic Dental Practice’s Social Media Marketing

Is social media marketing making your head spin? Have you tried to DIY your social media marketing and are now regretting it? Rest assured, you are not alone! There are tons of tools out there to help.

For example, you may literally have someone just posting a video from their phone every day or every week. You may feel that may not necessarily be the best use of your employees’ time. Rest assured we have some solutions that may save you some time and money in the process. 

Did you know that when agencies work on social media content, what they often do is batch create content items? Batch creating is not as complicated as it sounds. In regular people  (non marketing) language it translates to recording four or more videos in one session.  Brace yourself, another marketing term is coming, then they drip that content out on a schedule. Yes, drip like your morning coffee; slow release. The benefit to this approach is that when you need content whether it is once a day, multiple times a day, once a week, once a month, you already have something to post. Agencies can generate and schedule this content for you, which is very helpful, but if you want to keep hold of the reins, you can use some tools that give you some automated perks. 

Social Media Automation Tools 

You have some content saved but now what? You might be asking yourself, “How am I saving time and money if I still need someone to actually post it?” Here is the second marketers tip: Automate it, aka set it and forget it!

If you are on a budget and limited to platforms, try Facebook, which allows you to automatically schedule posts. You set the post up like normal, but instead of posting it right away, you give the website a time and date to post it. Then it will release it automatically on the set time and date. All that content that you post alongside it and put in the comments, like tags or captions, will post automatically as well. 

If you are in a scenario where you have a little bit more money, time, or expertise, there are other platforms out there. Our team uses Publer.io, but there are also some traditional platforms like Buffer or Hootsuite. These tools and ones like them have the ability to batch schedule posts, and not just on Facebook but on multiple platforms simultaneously. Imagine it… your cosmetic dental practice could be posting to Instagram, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn in one fell swoop! Instead of wasting time and energy posting to each platform separately, you can do all that stuff at the same time. These paid tools allow for a much more robust experience in terms of posting and creating and getting your content out there.

Building a Better Post (with some assistance!)

By design, many digital marketing tools have the ability to recommend and suggest hashtags that you can use as well. We’ll save hashtag discussions for another day, but when they recommend hashtags, it’s because they have collected tons of metrics and engagement data. That means using these tools provides you with metrics to see what is working and what is not working, which empowers you to make positive changes and ensure that your content reaches the right audience. What it all really comes down to is this: You are taking advantage of an ecosystem that works. If you have any questions about these platforms, you are not reinventing the wheel! You can pop open a Google search and find some better techniques for those platforms. 

Functions to Explore

The functionality of those tools is also great. They allow you to add multiple users. So if you have a new employee and you do not yet trust the employee’s judgment in terms of posting the content, you can use that function to make sure all content goes by you first. When that user posts or schedules content, you have the ability to approve or deny that post so it does not go straight to the channel and straight to the public. That is so helpful, especially if you have a team that is relatively young and still learning social media as a business tool rather than a fun outlet. This approval function gives you the ability to guide that employee on your social media presence without airing any subpar content while your employee is learning. You could also use that with an agency. Sometimes the agency does not necessarily understand your business nuances, and they may try to post something that is out of alignment with what your business is and what your brand values are. Even if they are the marketing experts, you are the expert on your business!

It also has the ability to post to two platforms easily, and to post in ways that you could not post before. It allows you to reschedule and to reuse posts in some scenarios. For instance, I could schedule a post for Facebook. Well, I am then able to take that same post and reschedule it and post it on Instagram, or wherever I get good engagement. That is really, really cool stuff! 

These tools also give you the chance to see historic content. When you are posting stuff in your channel, a lot of times, it is hard to see the old stuff. Well, having these tools means you can see if you have other people posting on your channel, who posted, what they posted, and when they posted it. In some instances, it can even tell you whether it was posted on a phone or on a computer. And so that way, if you have some challenges with the posts or you want to see who did what, these tools give you a log of the activity on your channel. In terms of accountability, that is huge. As a combination dental practice owner/social media manager, you have enough on your plate without worrying about mystery posts on your channels!

Finally, a part of these tools that I think is very underrated: the ability to batch upload! Remember earlier, I talked about that scenario of shooting several posts in one day? There is a special way to store it through these tools that allows you to group those uploads. With the CSV file, which functions basically like an Excel file, you put all the content that you want in there. Then, you type the description for each post, you put in a link to those images, and you just upload it directly to the tool. It automatically uploads your CSV content so that it is ready to post or schedule. Now, if that sounds intimidating, I get it! But with these types of tools, you can become your own social media expert. You might have one person doing this stuff all the time, but with this tool you can batch it one time and free up their time to participate in revenue driving activities for your brand and your cosmetic dental practice. 

These are just some of the ways you can use automated tools to extend your social media reach. If you are interested in learning more about how to grow your cosmetic dental practice, we would love to help you. We are on a mission to help 500 cosmetic dental practices double their revenue by 2026, and we want yours to be one of them. Now that you know how giving back can help you find your next patient, would you be interested in a free consultation for your dental practice?