What your Facebook page tells a patient when nobody answers it

Five seconds on your page

She has a molar that has been aching since Sunday. She searches, she finds two clinics near her, and she opens both Facebook pages in two tabs. She is not comparing your training against the other dentist's training. She has no way to do that and she knows it.

What she can see is whether anybody is home. She reads the top of the page, the date on the last post, the little line under the message button, and how the last few comments were handled. That is the whole judgement, and it takes about five seconds.

The clinic that looks awake gets the message. The other one never learns it was in the running.

The line under the message button

Facebook prints how quickly your page usually replies, and it works that out from your own history. You cannot type it in and you cannot turn it off by ignoring it. Reply slowly for a month and the page says so to every stranger who lands on it.

Pages that answer fast and answer almost everyone get a badge saying they are very responsive. It is a small grey line of text and it is the closest thing on the page to a promise. A clinic with that badge is telling a worried patient that somebody will pick this up.

The one number on your page you cannot write yourself is the one she trusts most.

The fix is not typing faster. It is covering the hours nobody is at the desk, which is when most of the messages arrive.

The date on your last post

Open your page the way she does and look at the date on the most recent thing you posted. If it says three months ago, that is what she reads, and she does not read it as a busy clinic.

She reads it as a place that might have shut down for good, or a place nobody goes to any more. Neither is true and neither can be argued with, because she is not going to ask.

This is why posting is worth the small effort even when nothing you post gets many likes. The post is not there to be popular. It is there to be dated.

The comment nobody answered

Under one of your photos there is usually a comment that says magkano po, or asks whether you are open on Sunday, sitting there with no reply. Comments are public in a way messages are not. Every person who scrolls past sees the question and sees that it went nowhere.

Worse, the person who asked is not the only one who wanted the answer. She is just the only one who typed it. Answer it in public, briefly, and the answer works for everyone who reads the thread afterwards.

If the honest answer is long, put the short version in the comment and invite her to message the page for the rest.

The part of the page nobody fills in

The About section is where she goes when she has decided she is interested and now needs to know where you are and when you open. On most clinic pages it is half empty.

• The address, written the way a rider or a Grab driver would need it, not just the barangay.
• The hours, including Saturday, because Saturday is when working patients can come.
• A phone number that somebody actually answers during those hours.
• The website or booking link, if you have one.

Missing hours are the expensive one. A patient who cannot tell whether you are open today will not gamble a trip on it.

The photos

Two photos matter more than the rest. One is the outside of the clinic, taken from the road, because she needs to recognise the place when she gets there and a stranger's first visit is mostly anxiety about being lost. The other is the reception area, because it answers the question she will not ask, which is whether the place is clean.

Stock photos of white teeth and models in scrubs do the opposite of what you want. She has seen them on every clinic page in the country and they tell her nothing about yours.

The hours nobody is at the desk

Look at the timestamps on the messages you have received. A large share of them land after the clinic has closed, in the evening, when people are finally sitting down with their phones and the tooth is throbbing again.

Those are the messages that decide things. She is not going to wait until morning and neither is the pain. By nine the next day, when your receptionist opens the inbox, the decision has already been made somewhere else, and it does not look like a lost patient in your records. It looks like a message you replied to a little late.

Where to start this week

Open your own page on your phone as if you had never seen it. Read the line under the message button. Look at the date on the last post. Scroll the last twenty comments and answer every question sitting there unanswered, even the old ones.

Then fill in the address and the hours properly, and put up one photo of the front of the clinic. None of that costs anything and all of it is visible to the next person who lands on the page.

The part that does not fit into an afternoon is answering at ten at night, every night, forever. That is the part we take over.