In our last blog that focused mainly on our office Facebook presence, I shared with you that when I came back to work for my husband at Pike Lake Dental Center last February, I had no idea how important social media could – and would – be to our business. As one aspect of my newly-created role, I agreed to help with our office marketing at Pike Lake Dental Center. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot about how to make our business better known in the Northland’s many communities and how to share what we do with, quite literally, the world. A major part of our office marketing now includes our social media presence on many different platforms beyond Facebook.

So what was the next step in the world of social media for our office after we reestablished our Facebook account? Instagram.

All three of my kids are on Instagram. I like to know how my kids and their peers are presenting themselves on social media, so I also joined Instagram a few years ago. Yes, I started out using Instagram to creep on my kids. I do have a ton of younger people I keep connected with, but I also have a lot of friends my own age that use Instagram everyday. My Instagram account has evolved for me personally and I have grown to really appreciate the app for its dedication to simple, artsy photos. The Instagram filters are fun to use and it’s easy to like other people’s photos. Instagram seems uncomplicated to me. Could Pike Lake Dental Center utilize Instagram too? Why not?

The overall feeling I get from the social media world is that the younger crowd, the 13-35 year olds, tend to gravitate toward Instagram, while the 35-80+ year olds prefer Facebook. Why not try to attract followers from both sites? Facebook owns Instagram and it’s extremely easy to cross post from Instagram and update Facebook at the same time. I started an account and off we went on our Pike Lake Dental Center Instagram journey.

Our office Instagram account has also evolved. It, too, is a constant trial and error experiment. Even though it is super easy to cross post with Facebook, I like to have similar, but not exactly the same, content for each. Because Instagram is more photo oriented and less text driven, I try to come up with fun pictures that are pleasing to the eye. Sometimes our Instagram post is a photo of toothbrushes or a snapshot of the inside of our autoclave. Instagram posts don’t have to be complicated – they just need to be visually descriptive or stimulating without a lot of words. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Early on, I put a video of our Cerec milling a crown on Instagram and people loved it. Sometimes a post is a hit, sometimes it’s a flop. I do find we have more dental professionals (dentists, orthodontists, dental labs and dental suppliers) follow our office on Instagram. That adds a little more fun to Instagram because we all seem feed off each other’s posts and ideas. We have Instagram followers in the dental profession from California, Arizona, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and Serbia.

YouTube has been a fun addition to our dental office social media marketing. We’ve created many different kinds of videos for and about our office and have added them to our YouTube channel. Not only does YouTube allow us to organize our videos in one convenient location, it is an easy way to share our videos on our website or on other social media sites. I can keep our website updated with fun and informative videos with clickable links to our YouTube channel. I also love being able to crosspost a video on Facebook and Youtube. Copying and pasting a link is so easy!

Pinterest for a dental office? Absolutely! Pinterest is a great place to share what we do at Pike Lake Dental Center. I Pin our videos and blogs to our Pinterest boards. We also have boards on our Pinterest account for things like funny dental quotes, recipes we have enjoyed at office potlucks, information about dental procedures and much more. Not everyone uses Pinterest, but it’s surprising how quickly our pins circulate throughout the huge Pinterest community.

Not every social media venture we have attempted has proven beneficial. We tested out Snapchat and that was a flop. It seemed cool at first, but it just never really took off. Instead of putting energy into something that wasn’t gaining us much public interest, we decided to let Snapchat go.

I’ve bounced around Twitter for awhile and you may be able to find Pike Lake Dental Center on Twitter in the future. You never know.

~Written and submitted by Stephanie Jugovich, staff member at Pike Lake Dental Center