I recently read an interesting article (you can read it here) recommending that dental practices start using more social media in their marketing efforts. I couldn’t agree more that social media has become an important part of dental and orthodontic marketing plans. What was interesting about the article was that it suggested you start with Twitter but with no reason why, other than it’s easy to set up an account.
There is certainly value in being able to quickly and easily set up an account with a social media outlet like Twitter, but what can you expect from those efforts? The article suggests that you go find followers and with Twitter, that couldn’t be easier. In fact, there are programs that will do much of that work for you although I don’t recommend them for reasons we won’t discuss today. The next step is to engage in conversations that are not pushy. The suggestion is to think of it as a party where you wouldn’t just walk up to someone and start telling them they should come to your office every few minutes.
The challenge that orthodontists and dentists are seeing when using Twitter as a marketing tool is that it has become so overused, mostly by internet marketers pushing products of their own, that it becomes almost impossible to push your message through the clutter. There is still the advantage of having Google and Bing pulling your “tweets” into their real time search data, but I’m not seeing it do much more than that these days.
So how do you use Twitter so that it’s effective for your SEO but doesn’t take hours out of your week leaving you wondering if you should be spending more time with Facebook or Google Buzz? Use Ping.fm to tie them all together so you can do the work once and have it pushed out to all of your social media outlets at once. That means you use the same strategies of having conversations, not just pushing your agenda all of the time and offering solutions and answers to questions you see come up, but having it listed everywhere you want to be seen after just writing it once.
Go ahead and set up your free account to see how it works. The cool thing is that once you have your Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or any of the other major social networking accounts set up you just add them to your Ping.fm account and they will be updated all at once from one place. Once you get into a flow with adding content to your social media accounts and you have someone on your team heading it up, you get to take advantage of ALL the major places to put your content without any extra work.
Let me know your thoughts, ideas, and challenges when it comes to social media marketing as well as any questions you have about dental/orthodontict marketing ideas in general by leaving a comment below.
Bye for now,
Brian
