Social media is more popular than ever, and chiropractors are certainly as excited about this trend as anyone else. Social media can help you to build relationships with colleagues, and to promote your chiropractic business. And there are certainly plenty of social media “experts” who would be more than happy to advise you (for a fee, of course). If you want to get started with social media, it’s a good idea to learn the basic facts about the three big fish in the social media pond.

Facebook: Not Just for College Kids Anymore

Facebook was preceded in popularity by two other social media sites, Friendster and MySpace. Both of these sites are still around, as are countless less-popular imitators. If you’re in a rock band, it’s worth your time to create a MySpace profile. If not, I think you’re better off focusing on Facebook. With more than 500 million active users, it’s the world’s biggest social networking site.

You’ll get a personal profile when you join Facebook. However, you can also create a Facebook page to promote your chiropractic business website. Then you can post content to your page, such as notifications of upcoming events. These updates will show up on the home page of anyone who has clicked the “Like” button on your page.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is basically a grown-up, buttoned-down version of Facebook. It’s a good place to build relationships with other professionals who could be useful allies. In addition to talking with other chiropractors, for example, you could scope out local medical doctors as part of your referral-building efforts.

Twitter

Twitter is something like a cross between a blog and an instant messaging program. As with text messages, you can send a tweet to a specific person. But you can also broadcast your thoughts to everyone who is following your Twitter account. Twitter can be a good way to drive traffic to your chiropractic website. Each time you publish a new blog post, tweet the title and URL of that post. That way, your followers will have a better chance of finding out about it. You can also integrate Twitter with Facebook and LinkedIn, so that your tweets are automatically added to those social networking sites.

Conclusion

Although there are hundreds of social media sites, the three in this article are the most important. Instead of trying to maintain a presence on scores of social media sites, I believe you will get better results by focusing on using just a few sites to market your chiropractic business.

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