Curious about how you can use Twitter to grow your dental practice? These simple guidelines will help you see how it differs from other platforms and its value for your business.
For information junkies, Twitter has become an indispensable tool. It’s a micro-blogging platform made up of bite-size, 140-character posts called “tweets” which stream constantly from news sources, companies and individuals. By choosing to follow people and organizations related to your interests, you can curate your own personal news feed, keeping you on top of the latest happenings in all the topics you care about.
If this description makes you think Twitter is more suited to heavy social media users, you’re right. The lightning-fast pace at which information is distributed and becomes irrelevant on Twitter means that if you’re not online when it happens, it’s already old news.
With that in mind, we at My Social Practice recommend that dental teams focus first on Facebook. It’s a better platform for accomplishing your business objectives of building relationships, turning patients into advocates, and helping new patients find you.
But that doesn’t mean Twitter is useless for dentists. If you feel like your practice is well established on Facebook and you’re looking to expand your social media presence, consider these 5 ways you can use Twitter to build your network and raise your online profile.
1. Follow Other Dental Professionals and Companies
Twitter’s unique strength lies in allowing you to connect with a network of people and organizations related to your career and interests. Follow other dental professionals, industry leaders and companies, and regularly retweet (share) content of theirs that you find interesting or relevant to your own audience.
Sharing others’ content not only builds goodwill, it helps you maintain top-of-mind awareness with other professionals and organizations that could help your practice thrive.
2. Participate in Dental Events
Just about any dental event you attend will have its own dedicated hashtag, which helps users find all the tweets about a specific topic. For example, last year’s Dental Digital Marketing Conference used the hashtag #DDMC16, which attendees could include in their tweets to join the conversation about the event.
Tweet your observations, share team photos, find out who else is at the conference and connect with them!
3. Stay On Top of Current Events and Social Media Trends
Checking Twitter daily will help you keep an eye out for popular events and trends you can use to create social media content.
4. Cross-Post Your Content
A great way to get more mileage out of a piece of social media content is to share it on all your practice’s pages. If you snap a practice photo or write a blog post and link it on Facebook, remember to share it on Twitter as well. You build your presence on multiple platforms with no additional work.
5. Build Connections in Your Local Community
Everyone loves gaining followers on Twitter, and following your patients’ personal accounts is a nice gesture that can strengthen your relationship with them. The same goes for local businesses and organizations important to your community.
Additionally, you can use search.twitter.com to search for tweets in your city that use the word “dentist,” or “dental” and respond to people looking for a dentist or that have questions about oral care.
About the Author
Jackson Hadley is a marketing strategist with My Social Practice, which provides a complete social media marketing solution for dental, orthodontic and optometric practices. A public relations specialist, Jackson combines the advertising and trust-building aspects of social media to help businesses connect authentically with their communities.
