Social media is the space where dental digital marketers nurture relationships with potential patients. It is a powerful medium that can boost a brand’s reputation within a short period of time. However, social media relationships can be fragile. If you are over-aggressive or use too many influencers, it could prove detrimental in the longer run—overexposure kills the consumer’s curiosity. Once your equation with the audience is spoiled, it becomes difficult to regain ground.
This is why some businesses prefer to have in-house social media teams, as the company’s own employees would be more familiar with the brand’s traits and the product or service lineup. However, not every dental office can afford to hire a dedicated social media specialist. So, here are four ways to let your own practice staff perform the role of social media brand ambassadors.
Instead of social media gurus, identify self-driven employees
Social networks continue to play a pivotal role in the world of digital branding. Social presence drives brand awareness like none other. It can boost revenue or at least create consumer footprints that lead to sales. Even without hiring professional talent dedicated to social networking, there is room to bring aboard your own personnel as brand advocates. Employees, when guided by structured strategy about how to manage the social networks, can be the best bet to promote a brand on social media.
1. Select educated, not just informed, brand ambassadors
A brand advocate should not need to recall or rethink anything about a new launch or the brand’s core beliefs. Merely being informed about the company or its policies is not enough. Employees chosen for social media outreach and networking need coaching to ensure they intimately understand the business philosophy, culture, products, and services of the dental practice. Try to train such employees using the best resources available.
2. Start small with daily and weekly gains
Not every employee chosen for the role is bound to succeed. There can be pitfalls along the way. This is why you want to spread the talent involved and give each person small tasks, small goals to achieve during the day and week. None of them should be promoted to the role of an official brand advocate. They need to function in the social space, dive in, and learn how to navigate.
Help them in reaching out to the right audience, narrowing the demographics by region, age groups, or other parameters. Get them familiar with social media customs. Young employees in this role can be overzealous. Ease them into the role and ensure that they promote the brand in a relatively safe way first, followed by more creative pursuits.
3. Create rules of thumb, guidelines, and more
You should understand that you are working with people who have social marketing skills but without professional training. It is in your best interest to have a rulebook for your social promotion activities. When a pool of employees works together as brand ambassadors, they need to have maximum clarity about anything that should not be shared or commented on.
From hashtag density to social posting schedule, ensure there are rules all the way for social networking employees to adhere to best practices. Something as seemingly simple as updating a social profile needs skill and tact. Ensure employees chosen for the role learn how to track and participate in social conversations with an emphasis on team guidance rather than individual supervision that might consume more time.
4. Share, borrow, recycle, and reoptimize content
Employees chosen for brand ambassador roles should know what type of practice data is shareable. Confidentiality-bound data that is not worthy of public opinion should have a clear, no-sharing clause. Not just press releases, but there is a lot of company data that can interest the consumers. Something as simple as the employees attending a training session offsite might make for good, socially shareable material.
The same images or videos can be posted with interviews of the training staff or reoptimized with just images across different social medial platforms. Similarly, information about new or upcoming projects or conceptualized products reaching production stage is worth sharing but employees should know how much of it is ready to be disclosed. Content owned by the company can be used with versatility, churned for different sharing platforms.
Some of it might be more marketing-focused with hyperlinks leading to landing pages. This ability to optimize and reuse data takes practice. Employees might jump the gun and instantly share pictures clicked at events like exhibitions or seminars, whereas best social sharing practices might suggest, ensuring each image is well captioned and accompanied by event details, and always linked to relevant website pages.
Concluding thoughts
Creating social media brand ambassadors is also about empowering employees, helping them learn, apply, and become more productive. With employees at the core of your social interactions, there is every possibility that the brand is able to engage more consumers because all interactions will benefit from company employees who understand the product design or buying psychology.
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