This customer spotlight series from Eric Ng, Demandforce’s Social Media Specialist, focuses on the critical building blocks for success in Social Media for Small Business. Enjoy! ~Annie

Like Annie, I too am on the hunt to find small businesses that embrace and effectively utilize social media.  Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to speak with one of Demandforce’s customers in our dental vertical,  Mortenson Family Dental, regarding the practice’s robust Facebook Page.  This customer spotlight will be a three-part series that will touch on the entire process you should consider when using social media: planning, executing, and adapting.

For the first part in the series, Mortenson Family Dental spoke at length about their social media strategy and how goals were set:

What is the overall Social Media goal for Mortenson Family Dental?

For Mortenson Family Dental, our goal is to “humanize” our social media initiatives while staying true to our brand.  We accomplish this by sticking to three principles – educate, inform, and entertain.  Educating, informing, and entertaining our Facebook fans not only ensures that they continuously visit our Facebook Page, but engaging with them on a consistent basis also solidifies our sense and feeling of community.  Ideally, we would like to make our Facebook Page a one-stop shop for our practices – a place where they can interact with the doctors, other patients, and ultimately schedule an appointment.

What is the overall Social Media strategy for Mortenson Family Dental?

It is impossible to achieve our goal and implement our three principles without engagement!  Just posting on your Facebook Page is not enough – lead off each post with a question, respond to each comment, or throw a contest.  Equally important is making sure you know your target audience. Your posts will be ineffective if it is not geared toward your Facebook fans. We work hard to understand our target markets needs and interests and then work harder to build a relationship between our brand and our fans/target market. Knowing your target market will get you into the mind of your audience, allowing you to connect with and get a response from the right person, while also making your Facebook Page lively and social.

Mortenson Family Dental’s focus on engagement, trust, and community are certainly characteristics of a successful social media campaign.  Understanding your target demographic is a critical step during the planning and strategizing process of social media, and I really enjoyed talking to Mortenson Family Dental about all the things they have considered before even starting their Facebook Page.

In the second section of our three-part series with Mortenson Family Dental, the practice will speak more about the results of their campaigns and the impact on their customers that the Facebook Page has made.  Be sure to check out our next social media blog post!

Related posts:

1. Enhancing Customer Relationships With Social Media – Customer Spotlight
2. Demandforce customer in action!
3. Neill Technologies, Makers of SalonBiz and SpaBiz Software, Builds Relationships and Drives Revenue Through Social Media
4. Kicking off 2011 with new social media features!
5. 5 Best social media practices for small businesses.

Tags: client services, customer care, Customer Interview, Customer Spotlights, customer success, Facebook, Social Media

This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 7:44 am and is filed under Customer Spotlights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.