More Patients Are Checking Your Facebook Page
Date: March 19, 2018Category: Author: David Hall
A consistent trend in dental marketing on the internet over the last four or five years is the tendency of prospective patients to seek more information before asking for an appointment. It used to be that if you had a number one ranking in Google, you were practically assured of getting a lot of phone calls. But over the past five years, patients are tending more and more to check out more websites before making a decision and to check reviews. We’re noticing this trend with several key metrics that we have been following.
In a previous blog post we shared how our surveys on the use of online reviews has shown a trend of more patients looking up reviews of practices before asking for an appointment. Our surveys also show that patients are checking out more websites. But the most dramatic shift we have seen over the past four years has been the increased frequency of checking the practice Facebook page.
We began tracking this in 2014, asking patients who request appointments with our clients if they had visited the practice’s Facebook page yet. Here are graphs of that data in 2014 and 2016:
Our latest data, gathered between December 10, 2017, and March 8, 2018, shows that percentage jumping to 35%. In other words, in under four years, the percentage of prospective patients visiting the practice Facebook page before requesting an appointment has nearly quadrupled.
Why? It appears that as time goes on, people are getting more sophisticated in using the internet. They are getting more comfortable with various platforms for learning about a dentist and are seeking out more information.
The bottom line for dentists who are marketing themselves online is that they need to be more careful with the quality of the imagery and the information they are presenting. Several years ago, many of us had an obsession with getting a number one ranking in Google, and that seemed to guarantee a certain level of success. In 2018, however, people are looking past that. This trend to check the Facebook page is only one manifestation of prospective patients becoming more discriminating. They are gathering more information and are making judgments about the quality of the dental practice based on what they are seeing. The dentists who present themselves the most effectively in all online media will have the greatest marketing success.
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