8 Top LinkedIn Tips for Dental and Medical Practices

LinkedIn is one of the top social networking sites, and the one with the highest business focus. It is an ideal platform for dental and medical practices to boost exposure among an educated, professional audience. As with all social media marketing, it requires effort to make it work for you. Here are our top 8 tips for promoting your practice:

1. Build a Page

The first step is to create a business page. The site doesn’t allow businesses to set up profiles, so you need to create a personal profile for your principal physician, practice manager or marketing officer. Set up a business page linked to the profile and populate it with information about your practice – including images, short video clips and content.

Make sure you fill in the ‘Services’ section, outlining what you actually do and provide.

2. Optimise for SEO

It’s not just your practice website that needs to be keyword-optimised for the search engines – your LinkedIn page should be too.

• Make your page search-friendly by including your primary, researched keyword in your headline, the summary of your business activities, products or services and your regular updates.
• Customize your profile URL with your company name or primary keyword; this makes it easier to remember and helps the search engines to find it.
• Add customised links to your profile using keyword-related anchor text, such as to your Twitter account or Facebook page.

3. Post On A Regular Basis

The secret to building up your page’s following is to regularly post status updates, ideally in the morning, according to statistics from the networking site. Aim to post 1-2 times a week. Post links to your practice’s website, your latest blog post, events, staff profiles, news and educational topics.

4. Curate Content

It’s not always possible to find something new to post about every day, so content curation can be a big help. Set up Google alerts to notify you by email of news about developments in your field of health care or dentistry, or reports on human interest stories. Post updates containing links to these articles and a short comment from your practice, and invite your followers to post their responses on your profile.

5. Find Influencers

Look for influential people in your dental and medical field using the ‘People’ search option and follow their profiles. Interact with their posts, share, comment on and Like their updates. Email them to introduce yourself and invite them to connect with you on the site.

6. Join Groups

Discussion groups are the lifeblood of LinkedIn, and there are multiple groups associated with the fields of medicine and dentistry. Search for groups with which you have issues in common and then request to join. Adjust your settings to notify you by email of new comments in each group, so you can keep up to date with them without having to visit each one. These discussion groups may provide information on the latest methods or techniques, or simply practice management strategies.

7. Contribute Strategically

Follow discussions in the group and contribute strategically. Focus on answering questions and being helpful and always comment using details of your business page in your signature. As you form relationships with other group members, invite them to follow your page and follow theirs in return.

8. Build your Network

Encourage your website visitors to connect with you on LinkedIn by adding a “Follow” button. Put your company page’s URL on your business cards, marketing material, email signature and eNewsletters. Invite your staff, patients and suppliers to follow you and to share your status updates on their own profiles.

By using these tips your practice page can raise awareness of your services and act as a platform for making your voice heard on topics of importance to your patients.