Dental Internet Marketing Strategies Need to Utilize Some Elements of Social Media to Boost Patient Base - Internet

Professionals in the medical industry are making an attempt to augment the sizeable void of patients due to economic downturn and the subsequent recession that saw many people losing their jobs as well as their medical insurance coverage. Medical specialists and general physicians in all disciplines, with a diminished bottom line, are left with little choice but to cut their costs on traditional advertising campaigns by using medical and internet dental marketing strategies as opposed to broadcast media and print ads to improve public awareness by building clinic-specific website pages in order to reach out to prospective clients within their neighborhoods. Many medical practitioners have turned to social media as an gradually more preferred method to market their practices; even so, the vast opportunities that this new technology presents leaves many bewildered on just how to best utilize it."The best way for physicians and dentists to use social media to pick up interest for their practices is to make short videos and infomercials to put on the internet," states Helmut G. Flasch, a dental practice management consultant and CEO of Doctor Relations, Inc., a dental consulting provider based in the Greater Los Angeles area in Southern California. "Once you have your video clips posted onto video channels such as Dailymotion and Metacafe, the major search engines like Google and Yahoo will see you as an opinion leader."Mr. Flasch notes that Google works by indexing the existence of a particular video clip that has been broadly distributed throughout the web and will consider it newsworthy to the degree of assigning it a very high ranking position within the search engine's listings . "YouTube, Metacafe and DailyMotion are sites which get an astounding amount of traffic. When people find a specific thing they like there, they begin featuring it by circulating it to their friends and to other internet sites, which makes it go viral. This is advert ising without having to spend very much at all and other individuals are going to do it for you by means of social media," he says.As another point, Mr. Flasch denotes that physicians should have blogs as opposed to a website mainly because there are hardly any coding prerequisites. Yet another benefit is that a weblog also leaves individuals the choice of using it for interactive purposes by leaving comments and connecting with other posters . "It is far more efficient to alter and make small improvements to a blog on a regular basis by posting a quick article overview or a short videothan it is to upgrade an entire website with a number of text-heavy pages," says Mr. Flasch. "You want to make certain to post new content material to your blog several times a week as Google watches the prevalence of blog revisions, which in turn, elevates your page position, and ultimately, your exposure to prospective patients."Flasch further adds that doctors and dentists need to distribut e their video clips and article summaries to social and professional networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as those users might forward a doctor's message on to other sites. . "Social marketing is definitely a team effort. The firms and offices that hire a social media consultant that can generate article content and video clips on a regular basis is going to do very well." Flasch finishes by stating that social media as a marketing device should not be disregarded by professionals who use dentist internet marketing.