Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:42 — 13.3MB)
Social media isn’t for every business but the more businesses implement social strategies the more that maxim may prove incorrect. Metro Dental Care is a dental practice that has several strong reasons for using social media. They are:
- A large number, 39, locations across a relatively large geographic metro area.
- Twin Cities metro residents actively use local web search in the dental keyword category
- Research showed Metro Dental that convenience was a major factor for dental patients aligned with an attribute of their brand.
- Dental is slightly less encumbered than other parts of health care from an insurance standpoint.
As you reflect on criteria 1-3 for Metro Dental you see characteristics that are not limited to healthcare at all. They are characteristics of potentially any retail, brick and mortar business. They have a large number of locations, with a significant amount of traffic required to support that business. Volume therefore is a factor. It is a topic where the web is used to inform consumers. I used Insights for Google to compare searches using a variety of key words in the dental health category comparing Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul. Across the board Minneapolis/St. Paul ranked higher in use of the web for information about dental than Chicago. It is just another data point that builds the case for being active and social online.
Metro Dental Director of Marketing & Communications, Candee Wolf, said convenience was a major factor for their patients and the market. Metro Dental as made convenience its brand mantra. From the 39 locations to extended office hours in the evenings and weekends, Metro Dental is about as patient friendly as you can get. Convenience is a buzz word for me in this era of communications. It means how can I save customers time?
Wolf said one of the first indications of convenience was a simple way to schedule appointments online. The form they have on line is perfect, simple, drop downs for type of visit, mobile number and email contact options to get back to the patient. 
The trigger word convenience when it comes to brand means efficiency and simplicity. Take this concept of convenience further and being mobile also has merit. Being mobile is a condition between the originator of the information, the recipient, and their location. In the case of a health care entity who’s number one brand quality and differentiator is convenience, delivering information to a mobile receipient it is logical tactic. That mobility can be in the form of a Twitter profile, a mobile application or website, a text appointment reminder or other distribution tactics.
Lastly, in health care there are unique factors such as insurance coverage and in-network references that play a major role in customer selection. I some cases these factors may be so strong that it impacts the goals of a social media strategy or whether your organization participates online at all. This is less the case for Metro Dental, but it is not without consideration either. Insurance coverage and referrals do play a role in their ability to garner new customers. This has impacted the goals they established for their social media efforts. Those goals include the amount of conversation about Metro Dental, the quality of those conversations in terms of providing valuable information related to dental health, and is it convenient for those they are engaging online.
Twins, Teeth, and Tickets
Metro Dental has a distinction of being the provider of dental services for the Major League Baseball Minnesota Twins. Kind of a good thing considering they have a new stadium, Target Field, and are in the running for a playoff berth (at the time of this writing : ) ).
Metro Dental is running a social contest using #twiceaday to get people to brush for two minutes twice a day, and tweet about it. Then there is a drawing for Twins tickets. It’s the perfect tie in to A) their unique position of being the Twins’ dental care organization and B) getting people involved in an activity tied to dental health. I must admit brushing twice a day for two minutes is not convenient for me, but the contest was fun and reinforced a number of attributes about Metro Dental.
For those that like numbers this contest generated:
- 88% increase in Facebook fans from May 1 through July 1. In large part Metro Dental attributes this to the #twiceaday campaign and Facebook advertising (jump from 246 fans on May 1 to 462 fans on July 1–and still rising).
- more than 50 tweets using the #twiceaday hash tag and growing it’s a summer long program.
- 11 blog posts by local mommy bloggers about the #twiceaday campaign in May and June. 63 total comments on those 11 blog posts in May and June.
In this podcast Candee Wolf and April Meyer discuss the details of the #twiceaday contest and their observations of social media in this health care setting.
Disclosure: I did win tickets but I credit that to my exceptional daughter who made me brush #twiceaday
