Building a Twitter following could begin with inviting friends, family, staff, professional contacts, and patients to follow your practice – just like the Facebook contact list previously discussed in an earlier post. Twitter also makes this very easy, you can notify your entire email address book (or LinkedIn network…) or search for friends by email. To start just click the ‘Who to Follow’ tab in your practice Twitter profile, then either choose the search by email application or search by individual email address shown here:

Again, is notifying all of these people of your practice Twitter profile important to them? Can THEY benefit at all from following your practice on Twitter?

If so, great. If not, just adjust your tack a bit. With Twitter you can also search out people (and companies, suppliers, associations, schools…etc.) by interest.  If you’re not into the suggestions Twitter provides, you can click the ‘Browse Interests’ option and sniff around a bit.

That’s the easy part.

It’s ok to let people know you follow your dental school and belong to a dozen associations – those are all good foundational connections that lead to practice Twitter profile credibility. What you really want is to nurture a loyal, engaged, and participatory following.

A reminder, as with anything else it’s probably good to avoid following topics that could promote controversy. Remember, nobody really cares what you have to say on Twitter – they care about how what you say can benefit them. For the dental practice that means promotional offers and socially inclined practice news. The news should be delivered directly from your practice blog, and the special discount offers should be distributed regularly.

For example, a discount promotion could be a 2-for-1 Tooth Whitening special that awards your Twitter followers with 50% off your chosen whitening procedure. That is a reason to follow your practice on Twitter. Yes, the regular blog links educating your patients on dental news improves your overall online visibility, and notifying your following that the staff CE meeting in Miami was spent at the beach is great. But, what keeps your followers coming back is benefits. And when it comes to benefitting dental patients, saving them money is the key to an engaged following that participates in your social media success.

Start slow, invite every single patient to follow your practice on Twitter – and give them a beneficial reason to do so…

Did you know the search engines track tweets and likes?

Can you see how that can affect your online practice visibility?

Follow us on Twitter and you’ll learn how.
 

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