As a provider of local advertising services to dental practices who want to market their dental implants procedures, Balihoo often has doctors ask about social media. In particular, they want to know whether or not they should post a Facebook page for their business. With over 350 million active users, what do they have to lose?

For a lot of dental professionals, they fear they may lose credibility and their professional appearance. Yes, they are posting content in a public forum, but they have complete control over it, so there's no reason to not use it to their benefit. Facebook is yet another free tool to enhance your local marketing efforts and project yourself as an industry leader.

Here are some guidelines for creating a Facebook business page for your dental practice:

- Create a business page, not a personal profile.
- More than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each week on Facebook. Get on the band wagon - post content regularly! We advise linking to news stories on dental procedures, posting updates on the doctor's continuing education, new technology your practice adopted, etc.
- Schedule a regular cadence for updating your page. Assign a few people in the office to post new content once a week. You don't want your page to go stagnant.
- Start asking your friends and family to become "fans" of your business. Using social networking sites for local marketing purposes is all about, well, social networking. Tap into your immediate social base.
- Get your office comfortable talking about Facebook. Hygienists have the most face time with patients, making them a key marketing tool. You will find that patients of all ages use Facebook, and it can be a good topic for conversation.

Facebook is one of many local marketing ideas we present to our dental clinician clients. Our primary intent with the local media strategy we build for these clients is to drive lead generation for dental implant procedures, but we always integrate their media schedule with branding, social networking and non-traditional advertising tools.