Chiropractic Marketing

The “hottest” buzz word on the internet today is Social Media. For those of you who would like to delve into Social Media marketing as an adjunct to your overall chiropractic internet marketing strategy, but aren’t quite sure what all the buzz is about, let’s take a minute to talk about the “Who, What, When, Where, and How” of social media and you, that’s “Who.”

Social media marketing may seem familiar in some ways to other chiropractic marketing strategies you’ve considered in the past, but still unfamiliar at the same time. In the “familiar” category, you wouldn’t consider any kind of marketing plan without making an effort to understand what it is and what you want to get from it. It’s important to ask yourself, “What are my goals?” Once you know what you want, it’ll be easier for you to use social media to your biggest advantage.

When you are ready to begin your social media endeavor, but before you start, it will be highly important for you to make certain that you “own your name” on all the social media outlets, that is to say, make sure that your name or the name of your clinic is attainable so that you can use precisely same name on every one of the social channels you want to use. There is a service that is free and will help you with your search when you’re ready. Knowem.com is the who to go to. Knowem.com will check where your name is and/or if it’s available or not on a substantial number of social media sites.

When you have secured all of your social media accounts, the next step is to make a decision as to where you ought to be active. Initially only a limited number of social media sites is preferable because, let’s face it, you have a clinic to run and patients to see. You won’t want to get involved in too many social media sites. 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 real presence in your community. What is definitely ill-advised is for you to try to “sell” on your social media sites, which is to say don’t sell your clinic, don’t sell services or products, don’t sell anything! The benefit 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 becoming a participant. There is truly no difference between the way social networking works and the way you normally network offline. People on social media sites don’t want to be sold to, plain and simply. Social media sites are very much like a neighborhood backyard barbecue. People are standing around talking about who they are and what they do, and then someone asks you what you do. Or, perhaps you begin the conversation by simply stating, “Hi, I’m Dr. ____. The same kind of interaction applies with social media. Social media sites should be handled the same way you’d “work” offline networking opportunities to promote yourself, i.e., answer the questions and concerns that let people know who you are and gets them interested in the who that’s you!

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