Many dental practices don’t see the benefit of twitter, which is understandable considering twitter quote 175million users at an ever increasing rate. So how will you be able to get your voice heard and who’s even interested in what you have to say anyway? Actually, lots of people. Not just your patients, your peers and so many others, you could be shocked to find, are interested if you are writing relevant interesting tweets.
A great way to really engage with your followers and beyond is by starting a twitter chat. Twitter chats are reminiscent of internet chat rooms and are a great way to speak to many members of an industry at once.
All you need to do is think of a relevant title and hashtag it (put a # in front of your title). It’s a good idea to steer away from advertising your services, it will be much better received if you speak about a general topic, for example tooth whitening. People tend to like twitter chats which are full of useful information rather than just a sales pitch. This way you can get a real conversation started, but you can still sneakily show which practice you’re coming from, which usually will tempt a cheeky look at your website!
The beauty of twitter chats is that you already have an engaged audience as they’ve chosen to follow the chat by searching for relevant keywords in twitter, so you’re already contacting your target audience, great news!
The only thing you need to bear in mind is that it takes a while to get really popular with such a niche topic as dentistry; so you need to host chats as often as possible, preferably once a week minimum. Advertising the chat through twitter, your own website and through word of mouth with your peers is a great idea to get yourself going and you’ll find you’ll get many more users begin to follow the chat in time. One of the longest running chats so far is #blogchat, this began in March 2009 and creates 10 to 20million impressions on a typical Sunday!
Hosting a chat like this not only boosts your personal profile, it should gain you followers, help seo and increase relevant traffic to your website, which in turn can create new patients- never a bad thing I’m sure you’ll agree!