Marketing Tips: What Twitter Can Do for Your Practice
How are you using Twitter for your medical practice?
Social media has created a new methodology for marketing. Each platform’s unique approach keeps advertisers and businesses constantly thinking of new ways to reach the masses. Deciding which outlet works best for you will help communicate with your audience better. Let’s start with Twitter.
Twitter is a unique social media platform that emphases brevity. Allowing its users to express themselves only within the confines of 140 characters. There is no room for a bloated post with chunks of paragraphs. The social media platform forces you to get straight to the point. Here are some marketing tips to give your practice’s Twitter account a boost.
Stay Up to Date
A big part of success in social media is keeping up to date with whatever’s going on in the world. Thankfully, Twitter is designed to stream current events as they happen, but you have to make that stream yourself. Make it a priority to follow news outlets, medical journals, and other relevant media outlets.
Also, play close attention to the “Trending Topics” tab on your twitters homepage. These trends get filtered through their respective subject matters. Regularly check what’s trending in the medical field.
Keeping up with what’s going on in the world allows you to craft relevant posts that will engage your followers. You want your followers to like and retweet your content. Likes and retweets help your page get more traffic.
Communication Is Key
It’s also a good idea to “@” the sources of information on your post. This assures that they’ll get a notification of you mentioning them, which can lead that source to your Twitter page. For example, let’s say a research facility discovered a breakthrough that specifically relates to treatments provided by your practice. It will be in your best interest to find out if the faculty has a Twitter account. If they don’t, find a site that has published a story about this topic and @ them in your post.
It’s important not to leave out the fact that when you @ anyone, they aren’t the only getting notified. All of their followers will also get a notification that you tagged them. Meaning that when you @ huge organizations, your opening yourself to be exposed to all of their followers.
Keep in Contact on Twitter
Many businesses use Twitter as a PR mechanism, responding to consumer questions via direct messages, or DM’s. This same ideology can be applied to communicating with medical patients. Turn your Twitter account into another line of communication between your practice and its patients.
Patients will love the fact that there are many ways to contact you. Make sure to regularly check your twitter messages if you plan on having an active account. You can also use your Twitter feed as a way to start a conversation regarding topics in the medical field. This has to do with using the right hashtags and following the right trends to make your feed more engaging.
We hope that this has helped guide your decision on how Twitter can be beneficial to your practice. For more on social media’s benefits, read our book “Social Media Marketing for the Modern Medical Practice: Social Methodologies for Patient Outreach and Acquisition.”
