Make your Tweets count!
Yes – I’m not joking! There are 500 million Tweets posted every single day. Twitter is the super-highway of the social media world. Quite literally – blink – and you’ve missed it! I can leave my Twitter page for 3 or 4 hours and return to find that I have missed between 500 and 1,000 Tweets.
And did you know that the life of a Tweet is around 24 minutes? Then it’s lost in the ether – gone!
Do you think I’m going to trawl through all those Tweets?
Certainly not! None of us has that much time. We might scroll back over a couple of pages to see what’s going on but after that – forget it! We’ve got stuff to do and anyway we’re notified about interaction on our own Tweets or when we’re tagged.
Tweets are very popular with Osteopaths and I’m guessing that’s because it’s quick, instant and you can catch up quickly between patients. Twitter is also the best place to interact and start little conversations with people of interest to you.
Don’t make this mistake though…
I’m talking about multiple tweets. Have you spotted this too? It’s when someone has clearly cut and pasted a whole raft of BBC or newspaper articles and fed them straight into their feed with a link. Or they may have used an automated scheduler such as Buffer or Hootsuite which has been set up incorrectly and is spitting out tweets like the rapid fire of a gun. I find this extremely annoying as, quite frankly, there is no strategy being deployed and it’s a rather lazy and ineffective way of marketing!
All social media platforms vary and are first and foremost about communication with people we like. Equally it is a mightily powerful tool for placing ourselves in front of our ‘target market’ and building relationships. In this world. people buy people and that will only happen when the ‘Know, Like, Trust’ process has been established. This is even more important in the Osteopathic world where treatment is quite intimate by its very nature.
So don’t forget that whilst it’s useful and generous to share interesting articles that will appeal to your specific audience or contacts, only sharing these kind of items is sending all your people off to the originator’s website! How on earth is this helping your marketing and your business?
What are the best kind of Tweets then?
I like honest Tweets which talk about how your day is going, how you’ve dealt with a tricky case, how you’ve solved a painful problem or what a grateful patient said to you as they left. This shows the human side of your work and helps people to understand better what you do and, even more importantly, what you can treat! Once again this helps to establish trust and also it educates your audience.
Equally, Tweets about what you can treat are helpful especially those beginning ‘Did you know…?’ which work really well. Often people won’t know! You also have an absolute library of tips, tricks, information, ideas, aids, remedies, recipes, advice, solutions, examples, hints, exercises, stretches and goodness knows what else stored in your grey matter, which you can share via Tweets. I personally find it fascinating just how much you know!
Another monster idea is to Tweet your blog titles and a link going back to the exact item for people to read more. There you can impart useful information about preventing migraines, beneficial stretches for your horse or how to spot when baby has reflux and what can be done about it. Building trust by giving information and advice is a key way of attracting more new patients. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that my blogs drive most of the traffic to my website and some of my most popular blogs have been ready by thousands.
I’d suggest that around 80% of your Tweets should be directing traffic back to your website to a relevant page. If you post that you have two spare appointments tomorrow morning, then send them back to your booking page. If you post about your passion for your work, direct them to your About page, which should be more about how you love to help your patients and why rather than too much about your education!
Always shorten your website or other links
Given that you only have 140 characters to make your point, don’t waste space with a long link back to your website such as this https://www.osteobiz.com/osteobiz-roadshow/ or you’ll be left with room for nothing else to say! Instead you can take the ‘shortlink’ code at the top of the relevant page you have accessed via your website log in and copy that instead. Alternatively, a handy tool is bitly.com where you can paste your long link and it will shorten it down massively. Not only that but it will monitor the clicks on that link which is useful information to see which Tweets are popular.
And here’s a tip. Given the 500 million Tweets you’re competing with, you might as well post at least four times a day to even have a chance of getting noticed.
Right – I’m off to Twitter now to see what’s going on…
