How Important is Social Media Marketing to Your Clinic?
Saturday, May 1st, 2010Social Media is the “hottest” topic on the Internet today. If you’ve been thinking about getting on board, but don’t know where the platform is, let’s take a minute to talk about the “Who, What, When, Where, and How” of social media and you, that’s “Who.” Then you can decide if you want to add Social Media to your chiropractic marketing strategy.
Social media marketing may seem familiar in some aspects to other chiropractic marketing strategies you’ve engaged in in the past, but still unfamiliar at the same time. In the “familiar” category, you’d never consider trying any type of marketing plan without making an effort to understand what it is and what you want to get from it. What are your goals? Once you’ve decided what you want, you’ll be able to use social media to your best advantage.
When you are ready to begin your social media effort, but before you start, it will be necessary for you to make certain that you “own your name” on all the social media outlets, which is to say, make sure that your name or the name of your clinic is attainable so that you can use the identical same name on every one of the social channels you decide to use. There is a service that is free and will assist you with your search when you’re ready. That who is knowem.com. This service will research where your name is and/or if it’s attainable or not on a substantial number of social media sites.
The next step, once you have all your social media accounts “captured”, is to choose where you ought to be active. Because you have a clinic to run and patients to see, in the beginning only a few social media sites is preferable and may well be all you’ll need. That way you won’t get unduly busy in too many channels. How do decide which sites are best for you? The big ones (where most of the action is) are facebook, twitter, linkedin, and Youtube.
What your social media activity mission should be is to build a true presence in your community. What you should never do “sell” on your social media sites, that means don’t sell your clinic, don’t sell services or products, don’t sell anything! The purpose of social media is for you to go out and network with the community. By all means, inform them about what you do, but do it by participating in the conversation. Social media works the same way as social networking offline. It is important to be clear on this point, people on social media do not want to be sold to! What might be a beneficial idea to think of social media sites like a neighborhood backyard barbecue. People are standing around chatting about who they are and what they do, and then a participant asks you what you do. Or, perhaps you begin the conversation by (just) stating, “Hi, I’m Dr. ____. The same kind of interaction applies with social media. “Work” your social media sites in the same way you’d work your offline networking communities, which is to say, answer the questions and concerns that let people know who you are and gets them interested in the who that’s you!