When it comes to social media for dental practices, a lot of companies are going to focus on Twitter and Facebook. After all, these are the best known social media sites and the most widely talked about – but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the other platforms.

LinkedIn is often regarded as a social media site for B2B companies but in fact it can be useful for anyone and especially when it comes to making powerful connections and using influencer marketing. Let’s take a look at how you can use LinkedIn to help yourself get found online and grow your business.

The Power of LinkedIn

Compared with other social media sites, LinkedIn has a relatively small number of users (over 300 million but under 400). What’s important about LinkedIn though is that it also happens to have some very high quality users and some very high profile names attached. LinkedIn is about the only place where you can potentially connect with someone like Richard Branson and Tony Robins. In theory, a dental practice or doctor’s GP could benefit from connecting with a prominent celebrity doctor or health advisor.

This all comes down to leveraging the ‘degrees of separation’ that attach us to everyone. Accept as many people as you can as connections on LinkedIn and you may just find that someone on there is a powerful influencer in your industry.

Useful Tools on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has some remarkably useful tools that make life even easier for a dentist marketing company. For instance, the ‘InMail’ feature allows you to message anyone that you are connected to on social media by one to three steps. Other powerful features include LinkedIn pulse which lets you publish your own content to be read by other LinkedIn users and reminders to congratulate your contacts on birthdays and promotions.

You can also create Company Pages on LinkedIn and then update them to inform all your followers (and staff) about news and recent updates. Targeted updates allow you to target specific members of your audience too.

Of course LinkedIn also goes beyond social media marketing for dental practices and can additionally be a powerful tool for recruitment, for finding business partners and for keeping yourself up to date with industry news.

For all these reasons, every dental practitioner should be on LinkedIn and should be working hard to build their connections and to gain exposure.