Instagram’s Tenant
This Part
If you ask a dentist today where you can find them, the answer is almost always an Instagram handle. That answer isn’t wrong. Instagram is where the audience already is, messages arrive fast, and to get started you need nothing but a phone. The problem lies elsewhere.
What you make on Instagram is yours. The photos, the text, the video, the knowledge you put behind it — all yours. But three things are not: the address, the access, and the archive. And in practice those three are what decide how long your work survives.
What Renting Actually Means
The account can be closed or hacked at any moment. There is no authority you can complain to and get an answer from. Years of work sit behind one password and one automated decision.
How many people see your post is the platform’s decision, not yours. The algorithm changes and your reach is halved, without you having done anything.
Your post from two years ago is effectively unfindable. There is no real search, and no structure to look through. The only way to reach it is to scroll.
A patient looking for one specific treatment searches on Google, not through the archive of your page. They don’t know your name, so they aren’t coming to browse your account. They type their question.
Filtering and outages are not hypothetical for us. They have happened and they will happen again. When they do, your entire presence goes with them.
Stories, the Most Acute Form
For years I put a large part of my teaching into Stories. None of it exists now. It survives only in my own archive, and even I can barely find it. Whatever effect it had, it had at that moment, and that was that. Nobody can search inside it — not Google, not the audience, not me.
And this isn’t only mine. A lot of dentists put their most serious scientific points into Stories. Which means they put the best thing they have into a format built so that tomorrow it is erased.
The point is that the value of an explanation has nothing to do with its lifespan on the platform. An explanation that is right and useful today is just as right three years from now, and still answers the same question. What decides whether it stays or goes is not its own quality, it is where it was put. The effort is the same; the lifespan is not.
This Is Not an Argument Against Instagram
Instagram is a good rented storefront. It is a crowded place, the people are there, and it works for a quick introduction. If you abandon it you have gained nothing.
The problem is when someone has only a rented storefront. That is, everything you have made is kept somewhere whose rules are written by someone else, whose lifespan is decided by someone else, and if it shuts down tomorrow you have no usable copy of your own work.
The Next Question
So what is the answer? The simple answer looks like this: have a website. But that answer is as incomplete as it is simple.
There are thousands of dental websites that nothing ever happens to. Nobody finds them, nobody reads them, and their owners don’t open them even once a year. Merely having a website solves nothing.
The next part is about two dentists who both have a website, and why it works for one of them and not the other.