As you have probably read elsewhere, Facebook already has 400 million users and is still growing daily. Twitter, the microblogging site, has approximately 175 million users and YouTube, the video-sharing website, is reportedly the third most visited website on the Internet after Google and Facebook. Your patients are almost certainly on one or more of these sites. Heck, so is your grandmother! But merely being on social media is not the same as using it wisely.

Social media is not, as some mistakenly believe, a great place to sell. (People who do get the same kind of reception they would enjoy if they walked into a cocktail party wearing a signboard and started handing out flyers.) Instead, social media is a great place to make contacts, even “friends,” who get to know you and your work. Once those relationships are in place, you can promote content such as a webinar that you are hosting or an event at your office. You can even build a core group of “followers” or “fans.”

While building relationships can lead to building your practice, social media does offer advertising opportunities that can be very precisely targeted. For example, if you are a hair transplant surgeon in Greenwich, CT, you can advertise an upcoming seminar that will only appear to male Facebook members in lower Fairfield County who are between the ages of 30 and 55 and who have keywords such as “balding” or “hair restoration” in their interests.

We would be happy to build a complete social networking program for your practice to fit your particular needs and goals.