How Do Dentists Measure Social Media?
Facebook sounds like it would be a great new way to amplify online patient word of mouth, and Twitter seems like an ideal place to broadcast your daily practice discount offer…or offer live dental chat – but how do you know if your efforts are a waste of time, or a new and cost-effective way to maintain communication with your patients when they are not in your chair?
Tracking and measuring your progress is key to any dental practice marketing campaign, social media is just another avenue of practice exposure.
Even if you are only at the inception point of your social media sojourn, tracking should be a primary concern.
Don’t make the mistake of planning for success without be able to measure what success amounts to when it comes to your practice.
If you run a morning radio spot targeting the drive time commuters in your local area, or list your practice on a freeway billboard, or send 2K postcards a month to new residents, or just simply just maintain a practice website, you want to know how effective the practice communication medium is, how much did it benefit your practice from running the marketing campaign?
Let’s take a look at how dentists can measure the benefits of social media.
6 KPIs for Dentists to Measure Social Media
KPIs = Key Performance Indicators.
Here are some normal benefits you should realize from your dental practice social media plan:
1. Increased new patient volume
2. Reinforced recall patient percentage
3. Decreased cancellations of existing appointment
4. Elevated online practice visibility
5. Enhanced community awareness
6. Amplified (digital) word of mouth – more reviews
The key to making sure your efforts do not go unrewarded are consistency, tracking, & optimization of content.
If you know how much is going out the door to pay for these services, doesn’t it make sense to understand how much return on investment is being generated by these efforts?
How Dentists Can Measure Social Media ROI?
With social media for the dental practice, the tracking issue is relatively simple – and will continue to evolve as the medium grows.
Technology makes it possible for the average dental practice to conveniently organize practice social media efforts to maximize return on investment while minimizing time spent managing your practice marketing portfolio.
Here are a few easy ways for you to begin tracking your practice social media efforts:
Facebook Insights
Facebook makes it very easy to see how your page is performing.
Simply login to your practice Facebook page, and click the ‘View Insights’ link located on the upper right-hand side of your page. This tracking section is split into two sections; Users and Interactions.
The Users section gives you all the basic page information; such as fans or likes, active users, and even age and gender info on page viewers.
The Interactions section gives you information on specific page activity – say what wall post was most popular for example.
Facebook makes it easy to track how your fans interact with the page, and what content you place on the page is most popular to them.
By understanding even the simplest of tracking metrics you can continually dial-in effective topics of practice social media discussion, beneficial promotional offers, and engagement tactics that result in new viewers and content sharing.
Trackur
With Trackur, you sign up for a free account and enter the keywords you wish to track.
Start with things like, your name or “your town dentist” or “dentist your town.”
You can easily refine the results with some simple search filters, then just sit back and let Trackur scour the web for your chosen keywords.
You’ll be able to see at a glance; the date published, source, title, and summary of each item discovered by Trackur.
You can then tag discovered items with a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
This enables you to keep track of who’s saying positive things about you and who’s attacking your online practice reputation.
Topsy
What Google is to the Internet, Topsy is to social search on Twitter.
Ok, maybe that’s a reach, but you can use topsy.com to track your dental practice social media plan performance.
See how many of your followers retweeted (shared) your content, and easily filter by hour, day, week, month…you get the picture.
A real-time Twitter search engine, for lack of a better term. Think Twitter is a waste of time, prove it by tracking your dental tweets via topsy.
There you have the beginnings of an efficient tracking and measurement platform from which to judge your dental practice social media plan performance.
These tools are simple to use and will cost you nothing – at least in terms of entering the social media fray.
You’ll soon find with all this information at your fingertips, your thirst for more needs quenching.
That usually involves more time, practice participation, and financial investment. Not to mention more tracking and measurement tools…
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