Using Facebook To Promote Your Chiropractic Business
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010Chiropractors are increasingly turning to social media to build their practices. Clearly, no discussion of social media would be complete if it left out Facebook, the wildly successful social media site that had over 400 million active users at last count.
Virtually every big corporation, from Coca-Cola to Starbucks, is using Facebook to communicate with their fans. Your chiropractic business can use Facebook for the same purposes, although on a smaller scale, of course.
Before you start marketing on Facebook, you need to understand the difference between Facebook profiles and Facebook pages. Facebook profiles are designed for individuals. A Facebook page, on the other hand, may be affiliated with a business or other organization, as well as with an individual. Everyone who signs up for Facebook automatically gets a profile, but it takes a few extra steps to set up a page.
Your work isn’t finished when you create a page. A brand-new Facebook page is not a very interesting place. Unless you’re as famous as Conan O’Brien, it’s not going to draw an avalanche of traffic. That’s why I recommend that you schedule time every week to add content to Facebook and other social media sites. This can be time consuming, which is one reason I recommend that you focus your efforts on one or two major sites and ignore the rest.
It should be noted that Facebook is not a replacement for your own chiropractic website. On the contrary, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites should be integrated with your existing web presence. For example, blog posts or events listed on your website can also be posted on Facebook. By doing so, you’ll be making this information easily accessible to people who may not often visit your chiropractic business website, but who check Facebook one or more times per day.
You can promote your Facebook page on your website, and vice versa. There are handy tools that can automatically share information among your different websites. For example, you can have your Twitter messages automatically posted on Facebook. Before you do this, however, make sure that you will only be posting information that is appropriate and relevant to your fans. People may get annoyed if they get a tweet from you every time you play Farmville. However, don’t think that you must mantain a strict formality at all times. On the contrary, mentioning a casual anecdote about your family or a skiing trip can make you more likable.
