I Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s Dad
Date: March 13, 2013Category: Author: Danielle Azar
….And I didn’t get a picture, but it did happen, I swear!
On Thursday, I went to the Western Regional Dental Convention to attend the lecture by Mark Zuckerberg’s dad, Ed Zuckerberg. Apparently, Ed Zuckerberg is a dentist who has proved himself a pioneer of new technologies in his practice throughout his career, including social media. So, I traveled to the Phoenix Convention Center (for my first time), parked my car for $12, and got a good seat smack-dab in the middle of the front.
A lot of what Dr. Zuckerberg said was pretty basic stuff for someone like me who’s immersed in all things social media for over 40 hours every week. He talked about how Facebook is “free word-of-mouth on steroids,” how to design great cover images, and how to create quality posts that people will want to engage with. What I did pick up are some great ways to explain the importance of social media to potential clients who just don’t get it. For example, how your Facebook page is essentially an interactive website that creates a bond with your patients through conversation.
A really good point he made was about existing patients. I had never thought about this but existing patients don’t really have to go to your website unless they lost your phone number. If you want to make an announcement about hiring a new employee, a special, or a new technology, putting it on your website will cause only new patients to see it. However, if you post these announcements on your Facebook page and your patients like you, your existing patients will know what’s going on because they are most likely on Facebook everyday.
Something else I learned, which I probably should have known already, is that unless a post gets a lot of interaction, only 15-20% of your fans will actually see it unless you actively promote it. I knew my posts weren’t reaching everybody, but I thought the percentage was higher than that. Promoting a post gets it everyone’s news feed. Good to know.
Zuckerberg touched on Graphsearch and how much more important likes are going to be when this tool is used by everyone. Graphsearch will not be based on exact match naming like it is currently but will allow users to search for general terms based on what their friends like. To me it seems like Facebook is trying to be more like a search engine while Google is trying to become a social media platform. I wonder who will win the battle to be everything to everybody (my $$ is on Google).
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