The Power of Facebook for Expanding Your Chiropractic Practice

"We ain't one-at-a-timin' here. We're MASS communicating!'" - Pappy O'Daniel

If you think of Facebook as a place for high schoolers and soccer moms, think again. Facebook has quickly earned a following of over 500,000,000 fanatical users who tune in early and often every day. Moreover, as of March 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in daily pageviews. However, that alone is not the reason to make Facebook a part of your chiropractic online advertising strategy.

EVERYONE KNOWS WHEN YOU "LIKE" SOMEONE

Until now, when a new patient found you via Google, Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, or NYSCA.com, how many friends could you assume they'd tell about your site. Answer: zero. They might make it a bookmark or favorite but probably did not tell anyone else about your site at least not until after their first appointment. THIS IS WHERE FACEBOOK CHANGES THE MARKETING GAME.

HOW does Facebook spread the word virally?

1. When someone LIKEs a Facebook business page, Facebook automatically notifies all their friends that they like your page and includes a link to your page
   
2. The average Facebook user has 130 friends... who'll all immediately learn about your page

Forget "you tell 2 friends and they tell 2 friends and so on and so on..." Now it's "you tell 50 friends and they tell 500 friends and they tell 5000 friends...."

We would all have drastically more successful businesses if Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al. had been notifying everyone in your Outlook Address Book every time you added a site to your Favorites List.

But WHY does Facebook do this?

BIRDS OF A FEATHER "LIKE" TOGETHER

Think about it - If someone is searching for a New York chiropractor, chances are that at least some of their friends and family are patients too... and maybe their friends as well. Facebook, like all online publishers, want you to view as many pages / visit as possible. Their notification system tries to maximize pageviews and thereby ad revenue. The more pages you view, the better the chance that you will click on one of the many right-margin paid ads.

The benefit to your business is that you do not need to get 1000 Google searches to get 1000 people to know that it exists. Now we can benefit from the viral nature of social networking and grow our practices like never before.

Music City Web Design has been a leader in the Nashville website design market since 1996, and specializes in internet marketing and search engine optimization.