Do your social media pages need more likes, shares, and comments? You may be able post more engaging content for your audience. Here are some easy ways to start posting content your followers will be more likely to interact with.

Know your patients

The first step towards more engaging content is to map out a profile of the people following your page. Do you primarily serve young families? Seniors? Maybe you’re in an upscale, highly-educated location? Close your eyes and paint a mental image of your three most common patient profiles. There’s usually a pattern. Once you develop these profiles, it’s much easier to create content to match each of your primary target markets.

Lighten the mood

Patients don’t usually log into social media in search of serious content. Keep an eye on branding and avoid inappropriate or controversial content, but feel free to share funny photos or cute memes in addition to clinical content.

More images and video

Across all industries, images and (especially) video score far more engagement than text-based content on social media. You’ll want to share all three, but too much text may discourage followers from engaging with your page.

Ask questions

From sharing serious opinions to signing up for quizzes, people like answering questions online. The easiest way to get patients to engage is to lay out an open-ended question and see what comes back. Not every question needs to be dentistry-related. Multiple-choice questions and “vote on your favorite” work, too.

Mix it up

Lay out a social media calendar for each month, or quarter, and make sure you’ve got a variety of content styles and topics to keep your page from getting stale. Share some oral health tips, some community outreach, some “about our team”, some funny memes, some information about services and so on. Just don’t do the same thing over and over again. Even contests and giveaways will lose their impact if you do them too often.

Check your analytics

It’s a good idea to periodically check your analytics to see how different types of content are faring. This takes some of the guesswork out of determining what type of content is most engaging for your audience. Test your theories by producing new content that’s similar to content that scored well in the past and comparing engagement data. Investing a little time in reading the data can really pay off over the long haul.