Is your dental practice using Twitter to connect with your current patients and reach out to new ones? If not, you really have some catching up to do! Twitter is quickly rising in popularity and serves as a primary competitor to Facebook in terms of active users. However, any successful business should utilize both venues of social outreach to further their online visibility and marketing. If you aren’t quite sure where to start marketing your practice on Twitter, read this helpful guide for a head start in the game!

Sign Up For Twitter — Choosing your Dental Practice’s User Name

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for a Twitter account for your dental practice! However, with its many millions of members, quite a few usernames are already taken. If your dental practice was named “Aloha Dental” for example, you might find the Twitter username “AlohaDental” is already taken. If that is the case, you’ll need to be creative. Try “AlohaDentist”, “AlohaSmile”, or even “AlohaDentists”. However, you run the risk of being too closely named to the owner of the name you wanted, so it may be best to differentiate your username a little more to be more unique. You can try “MyAlohaDentist” or even “TheAlohaDentist”. One technique we use regularly for our dental clients is to create a name with the city or state in the username, for example “AlohaSantaRosa”.

Customize Your Profile

You’ll want to stand out from the crowd. You have the opportunity to customize your Twitter profile background image or color. We recommend using an image that is similar to the background of your website to promote continuity in graphics and familiarity.

You’ll want a familiar profile picture too. It’s best to use your dental brand logo. However, you can also have a picture of the owner. It’s important to communicate that you are a local business, so we always recommend having your brand logo be the profile picture.

Place something in the “About Me” section. Put your phone number in there! People may be encouraged to call you right then and there when visiting your Twitter page, and you don’t want to miss out on those opportunities. Fill in your city, state location as well so visitors to your page know where your business is located. And, just as important as phone number is your website URL. Provide all the information that people need to know about your business.

Make Your First Tweet

Creating a tweet is very simple. It’s 140 characters (spaces included). Here’s an example:

Want to know how long 140 characters is? Take a look at this line of text - this text line is exactly one hundred and forty characters long!

Don’t go past that amount, otherwise you won’t be able to post. That’s the beauty of Twitter. It’s answering the question “What’s On Your Mind?” in such a short amount of space. The challenge of creating a tweet actually breathes some creativity into whatever you say, because every word matters. This applies to both personal tweets (from a personal account) and tweets from a business.

Don’t overthink your first tweet, just write something and anything. It could even be, “Welcome to my new Twitter Page – Signed, Aloha Dental” It’s good to get comfortable using the Twitter interface, because you’ll be using it a lot if you are marketing your own dental practice!

Create a List of Things to Tweet About

At first, you might go crazy tweeting about everything under the sun regarding your dental practice. But there will come a time where your creative juices aren’t flowing anymore, and it may seem discouraging. That’s why we always encourage people to create a long list of things to tweet about. Don’t post them all at once, instead save them for a rainy day.

We are going to post a list of tweets in an upcoming post to help your creative process get started, coming in the next couple weeks. Keep an eye out for that one, it’ll save you a lot of time!

Know What People Want to Read

While it’s good to be very active on Twitter, it’s not so beneficial to tweet about irrelevant topics, especially ones that could be controversial. Keep them simple and light-hearted. People can and will unfollow your Twitter account if they are pestered or offended by your posts!

Generally, for a dental practice, it’s good to tweet about educational, informative, humorous things. These kinds of things get people really interested in what your practice has to offer.

Understand @ and #

The “at” symbol (@) signifies a tweet to someone. So if we (@dmninjas) wanted to tweet to Aloha Dental (@AlohaSantaRosa), we would write @AlohaSantaRosa Happy New Years! We wish you the best of business Simple, huh?

A hashtag (#) represents a post to a ‘category’ of sorts. They can be utilized in several ways:

Inline Hashtags: Went to the #dentist today and got my teeth cleaned. Thank you @AlohaSantaRosa!

Separated Hashtags: Went to the dentist today and got my teeth cleaned. Thank you @AlohaSantaRosa! #DentalHygiene

See the difference? It’s a good idea to use a mixture of both. It’s also a good idea to include 1-2 hashtags per post, because otherwise it may look a little over-done. It’s also a good idea to use hashtags for broad categories. Remember, hashtags are important because people often search through hashtags to find people to follow. A good example of a hashtag to use is #dentists, a not-so-good example is #DentistsInSantaRosa because the latter is a bit too specific for people to likely search for it.

Hash tags are a great way to spread your outreach on the Twittersphere.

In future posts we’ll be going over additional marketing strategy for Twitter. In the meantime, be sure to check out our Free Dental Marketing eBook where we go over all these concepts and much, much more!