As a follow-up to my post on Twitter for Local Business, here are some ideas on how a chiropractor can use Twitter to connect with potential new clients.
Step One: Sign up and pick a username. It can just be your first or last name with an initial, or you can choose an alias like this one: DrMommy. As you are working at present yourself as a health professional, you will want to add a photograph of yourself, to show you are a real person. You can poke around on Twitter to see what others are using to get some ideas. You can change the user pic easily later, if you like.
Step Two: Add a few sentences to your bio on Twitter. This is important. Why should people follow you back? You need to provide them some kind of idea of who you are and of your interests. If you have a professional blog, website, page on LinkedIn or Facebook, add the URL.
Step Three: Write your first tweet. Tweets must be 140 characters or less. An example:
“I am so glad I have been able to help my new client with her back pain after her accident.”
You can even phrase it as a question:
How can find others on Twitter who might need chiropractic services?”
Or:
“I’m a newbie on Twitter, but I’m not new to health services. I know a lot about” (fill in with x y and z).
Step Four: Write a tweet with a link to an article. It can be any article, but why not choose one that will show your knowledge of your health profession? To write a tweet with a link to an article, first put in the title of the article. That will help get others attention. Then paste in the URL. If your tweet is now more than 140 characters, and your Twitter application does not automatically shorten it, you can use a URL-shortening service to get a shorter URL.
Step Five: Find others to follow. If you already have a few friends on Twitter, follow them (and ask them to follow you back). That way when you click on new followers, you have at least a few people following you already.
digitalchiro (social media training for chiropractors)
Updated: Digital Chiropractor (digitalchiro) trains chiropractors on how to use social media as a marketing tool for their practices.
For learning more about Twitter, I highly recommend following clydeboom.
Step Six: Follow people in your area. Chiropractors need to have clients that are in their own geographical area. Here are some tools to help you find local people:
You can also look in http://wefollow.com/ for Twitter users in your area. I am listed in the New Jersey section (search for newjersey).
Step Seven: Talk to the people you have followed. You can reply (@username) to their tweets. Or you can RT (re-Tweet) what someone said. Retweeting is an excellent way to show you enjoyed what the person had to say, and you want to pass the valuable information or inspirational thought unto others. I often reTweet good articles.
Step Eight: Learn how to search. Twitter is a great tool for research on anything current. You can try searching for ‘health’ or ‘back pain’ or ‘chiropractic’ or any other keyword. Some search tools:
Twitter application TweetDeck has search tools built-in.
Question: Do you need to have a blog to go on Twitter?
Answer: No. However, the more web presence you have, the more professional you will appear to potential clients. LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs on WordPress.com or on Blogger are all free ways one can market oneself. A professional website or a professional blog can be aides in marketing your services to these potential clients.
If you live in New Jersey, attend a talk by Eva Abreu about Social Media. She will be at the Highland Park Public Library on April 30 speaking about Social Media Marketing. I will be there, too!
If anyone has more ideas about how a health professional can use Twitter to reach potential clients and market their business, please feel free to leave a comment. Questions are also most welcome.
Raritan Avenue last fall, near PJ's Coffee where BNCJ meets
On Tuesday I attended my first meeting of a local networking group, BNCJ. I found the other attendees friendly and informative, and I look forward to joining the organization. There was a lawyer, a home inspector, a contractor, a travel agent, a financial services representative and an stock broker. And me, the web designer! Or web builder, as I sometimes call it. Design is only a small part.
At one point I mentioned Twitter, and some of other people had never heard of it. “Twitter? Is that like Facebook?” Actually, it’s much easier to use, I responded. Instead of connecting with people you already know, it’s easy to meet new people. I cautioned them not to use Twitter for direct sales (you will get unfollowed fast if you are too pushy). The people I follow want to have intelligent discussions on a variety of topics.
Yesterday I posed the following question on Twitter:
"Question: can local biz (ex. contractor, plumber, doc, even hair dresser) use Twitter to grow biz? Thoughts?"
Shimon responded: “answer (IMO): yes if they have tips and promotions (like make up tips for women or computer coupons). Women oriented should b better”
liajen (aka Jennifer Fong) responded: “I believe it can. You just build your targeted niche through local searches (such as with twellow) & build relationships.”
What do you think? How can a local business use Twitter?
"#Torah for artists: a screen of turquoise, purple and scarlet wool (what colors!) and twisted linen, work of embroiderer (Exodus 36:37)"
Want to see all the recent #Torah tweets? Go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in #Torah. Enjoy! (and it’s even easier to access if you use TweetDeck and dedicate a search column to #Torah).
Want to read more about #Torah? Read Rabbi Shai’s post on the JPS site.
If you want to learn more about Judaism via Twitter, the best Twitterer to follow is JewishTweets. You will not be disappointed! If you look at all the folks following or being followed by JewishTweets, you can find many other Jewish twits I mean Tweeps.
Tweet Up February 26, 2009 at Panera in PiscatawayYesterday I attended my first TweetUp. What’s a TweetUp, you ask? Well, you know how I’ve been chirping chatting on and on about Twitter. And I blogged about connecting with New Jersey locals on Twitter. Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting these people in person: @rongraham1 @ScottBradley @JerseyBites @annie_lr @K9Confections @mikeconaty @Alig7 @SusanLevinson @liajen @Eva_Abreu (organizer of the event!) as well as Paul Grzella and Skip Hidlay of the Home News Tribune.
And if this isn’t enough, Scott Wyden (who wasn’t at the TweetUp) is working on a New Jersey Twitter List. Live in New Jersey? Go sign up on Scott’s list!
How can you use Twitter to connect with people live in your location?
One of the wonderful parts of working on this post is “meeting” so many different people who live near my home in Central New Jersey (mostly Central). Over the past two weeks I’ve “collected” these new friends (in no particular order):
Deirdre Breakenridge is President of PFS Marketwyse, a full service marketing communications firm and the author of two recent books, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and PR 2.0, New Media, New Tools, New Audiences. You can read Deirdre's blog, PR 2.0 Strategies.
Lori's Earth Friendly Products: Our mission is to bring natural, healthy, kosher products to our friends, and the world. We carry: Fiber Juice, other fiber products, Stomach Friendly Coffee, Garlic Spray, VitaTops, High-Fiber Pasta and Mac & Cheese, Soy Entrees and Textured Soy Protein.http://www.earth-friendly.com/
Marketer, video producer, web guy & rabid jazz fan, working with nonprofits & businesses to effectively use old & new communications tools. http://michaelconaty.com/
social entrepreneur, cause-related marketer, social media learner, direct selling executive, instructional designer, wife and adoptive mother, living out loud! http://liajen.wordpress.com/
It's all about having fun! Organizing Coach, Founder STO / Eva's Edict 5 Minutes #EE5, Speaker, Writer, Volunteer: Intergenerational Programs, Wife, Mom
How did I go about getting these contacts in Twitter?
1) I put “New Jersey” in a search column in TweetDeck and left it there. Each time I start up TweetDeck, I see more tweets about New Jersey. But truthfully, I didn’t find too many new people this way.
2) I asked people I already follow in my location if they wanted to be included in this post. I got much enthusiasm! Some of them suggested other people they follow who live locally. In general, that’s the best way to find new folks to follow; see who your favorite twitterers are following!
3) To make the contact more genuine, reply (use the @, as in @leoraw) to specific tweets to get to know others better.
4) Every now and then, look over everyone else’s tweets, find a good one, and retweet it! To retweet, put ‘RT @twittername’ at the beginning of your tweet. Retweeting is a great way to build community.
Update: I hope to meet a few of these “tweeple” (Twitter for “people”) on Thursday morning.
Note: to anyone in this post, feel free to DM or comment below any corrections, edits, suggestions.
I have been telling the librarians at the library about Twitter. If you put in a little effort at first, you can later use Twitter to increase contacts and resources in whatever area interests you.
Step One: Sign up and pick a username. You are going to need to stick with the name you pick, so pick carefully. It can just be your first or last name with an initial, or you can choose an alias like this one: jedilibrarian. If/when you are ready to represent your library on Twitter, you can use a username that reflects your library. You should also get an identifying user pic (I use my little froggy), because you might stand out a bit more if you have a good picture. You can poke around on Twitter to see what others are using to get some ideas. It doesn’t have to be a photograph of yourself; just something that looks good tiny. You can change the user pic easily later, if you like.
Step Two: Find some people to follow. I’m going to make this easy for you.
Step Three: You can find others twittering about any topic by keyword by using search.twitter.com. You don’t have to follow someone to read their tweets (unless they have them protected). You can also learn about hashtags.
Step Four: Write some Tweets. Tweets need to be 140 characters or less. It takes getting used to, but you can learn to shorten “you” to “u”, for example. If you want to Tweet a URL, just paste it into your tweet. Try to fill up your tweet with key words. Let’s say you are writing about teen films. You may want to use the words ‘animation’ or ‘movie’ or ‘film software’ or any other descriptive words. Hash tags can be useful, too; you can find lists of hash tags (key words with a # in front, such as #books or #library) on the hash tag site.
Step Five: Get others to follow you. You can’t force anyone to follow you. But if you provide Tweets with valuable information (valuable is relative, we all have different ideas about what’s valuable!), others might find you and decide to follow you. You will probably also find that if you follow others, they might follow you back. No guarantees.
Step Six: Reply to someone. Did someone Tweet something of interest? You can reply publicly by typing an @ sign in front of their username and then write your Tweet. Like this:
@leoraw Thank you for your post on how to get started with Twitter.
Note my regular readers: if you see ideas that were repeated from old posts, thank you for being such an avid reader! I’m planning to write a series of How To Use Twitter type posts, and I hope to gear them toward different audiences.
I would prefer just to be writing about the sunset my daughter and I saw on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park earlier this week. When we got into the car and I took my camera, she made me promise not to photograph any flowers on our trip. But she didn’t say anything about sunsets.
Unfortunately, there is too much urban drama going on in the home city of photo blogger magiceye. As I type this post, I am wondering about the safety of the Chabad rabbi and his wife, trapped by terrorists in the Nariman house in Mumbai. (Update: Chabad Rabbi and his wife in Nariman house reported killedtortured and then murdered, and more than 125 too many reported dead in Mumbai). Thank you to Dina in Jerusalem for posting about this. To use Twitter for updates, go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23mumbai or click http://hashtags.org/tag/mumbai/. For updates on Chabad, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=nariman (Nariman is the name of the Chabad house in Mumbai).
In these two posts, JPIX and Good Evening New Jersey, I used <table> code to set up a page with many thumbnails. Why did I choose <table> tags? The JPIX post best illustrates the reason; one gets a lot of control over how the images and linked text will appear.
Do you see the problem here? Those captions are not lining up neatly under their photos. So I’m going to put each photo with its caption in a cell (the cell tag looks like <td>), and all these cells will be placed in a row (<tr>) in a table. I could create more than one row, but for this example, one row is enough.
If you are really going to attempt this method, I suggest you familiarize yourself with HTML table code. You can start with this table tutorial or read the W3 Consortium page on tables. Also, look at the source code for the posts I mentioned at the start of this post that use tables (in Firefox, one can see source code by selecting View – Page Source).
If I haven’t scared you away yet, here’s how the code will look for a table of three of those thumbnails in a row, with captions under each photo:
<table>
<tr>
<td><a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=fallen_leaves038.jpg”><img src=”https://www.leoraw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/th_fallen_leaves038.jpg” alt=”red tree” title=”th_fallen_leaves038″ width=”160″ height=”120″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-3746″ /></a>
<a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=fallen_leaves038.jpg”>Red Tree on Raritan Avenue</a></td>
<td><a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=autumn018.jpg”><img src=”https://www.leoraw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/th_autumn018.jpg” alt=”yellow leaves” title=”th_autumn018″ width=”160″ height=”120″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-3745″ /></a>
<a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=autumn018.jpg”>Bunch of Yellowy Leaves</a></td>
<td><a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=autumn014.jpg”><img src=”https://www.leoraw.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/th_autumn014.jpg” alt=”leaves” title=”th_autumn014″ width=”160″ height=”120″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-3744″ /></a>
<a href=”http://s421.photobucket.com/albums/pp294/eema3kids/?action=view¤t=autumn014.jpg”>Red ‘n Yellow Leaves</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
A number of readers asked if I could explain how I arranged the images for the JPIX carnival.
Step one: Gather the images
When there was an image that I wanted to use for JPIX (many of the posts, even if submitted, had multiple photos), I right-clicked on the image and saved it to my hard drive. I tried to name the jpg (the common file format for a photo) by both something in the photo and something in blog’s name.
For example, I named the photo at right lastrose_id.jpg, with the lastrose part being a reminder that post was named “Last Rose” and the id part as a reminder that it is Ilana-Davita’s photo.
After saving a bunch of photos in this way to my hard drive, I had quite a collection, but in some cases I still had to hunt when I got up to the part where I linked the photo online, because some blogs had lots and lots of photos in one post. So in those cases one also might want a reminder of the placement of the photo in the post (middle, 6th, or bottom might be examples to add to the name of the file).
Step Two: Sizing Those Images
So how big to make each of those images? At first I thought to make each one 150px high. After uploading about twenty at 150px high (this was a mistake, I should have just done three and tested those), I decided I preferred 115px high. You will see on the carnival that most are this height (to see the height of a photo, right-click and select Properties), but some were other heights.
In order to resize a photo, you open a photo editing software package and change the height size to 115px. The software should proportionally scale down the width for you.
Step Three, easy: Arranging the Photos
First, I’m going to tell you an easy way. Just upload each photo to your post, line up three on a line, and link each photo to the original post. It might look nice to put a space between each photo. I often do this in code by typing: Here’s an example:
Step Three, complicated: Arranging the Photos with Blog Links
Since I wanted the blog to have the blog links directly under each photo, I used table tags. I will discuss table tags in another post, next week.
I added a little WordPress plugin called Subscribe to Comment that allows you to check a little box on the comment form so you can get follow up comments in your email. A reader asked about it, so I decided to implement the plugin. Feel free to try it out (I always enjoy your comments, in general, all of you!).
I found a recommendation for the plugin on this WordPress blog called WebDesignerWall. If you like funky, beautifully designed web pages, it’s worth a peek.
There are a multitude of WordPress plugins, and some seem quite fun. Simple Recent Comments is one I must do soon. Maybe I’ll add it to the bottom, along with a list of archives of posts. I should try out some simple stats package, but those you won’t see. Unless I tell you. Oh, yes, I could tell you…another post idea!
And here’s an experiment with a blockquote that has a different border and background than the one I standardly use. More fun with WordPress.
As an additional experiment, I am going to set this post to be published at 3:15 am EST.
As a follow-up to my post on Twitter for Local Business, here are some ideas on how a chiropractor can use Twitter to connect with potential new clients.
How can you use Twitter to connect with people live in your location?
