I just had a chiropractor ask me to create a list of the most powerful chiropractic marketing tools on the web and provide a brief description of them. Here's a down & dirty article on some of the websites that can help you get new patients.
Chiropractors have several powerful marketing tools at their disposal, most of which are free. I'll outline and describe a few of them and give you a bit of advice on how to properly leverage them. Here's the list of Chiropractic Marketing tools:
Facebook
The largest social networking site in the world and home to over 500 million users, this website is the perfect platform for communicating important healthcare information and for positioning yourself as the primary healthcare expert in your community. Facebook is most effective for chiropractors who want to share valuable information with a broad audience of people. Warning: do not ever use Facebook as an advertising platform. In other words, don't sell special offers, coupons, discounts, etc. It doesn't work and it'll harm your reputation!
Twitter
This is the second most powerful social marketing tool in your arsenal. Twitter allows you to post extremely short (140 character) messages to anyone who chooses to follow you. The difficulty is getting a critical mass of people to follow you. This can be a great tool is you have a clinic with several hundred patients and you're in a relatively densely populated metropolitan area BUT it doesn't usually work well for rural areas or smaller clinics. I highly recommend attaching it to your blog's RSS and automating it. Give it a shot and see whether or not it works for you!
LinkedIn
This was originally designed as a professional alternative to Myspace. It's a great place for patients to review your credentials- think of it as an online resume. It's a good place to expand your professional network and garner some fantastic recommendations. If you dream of managing a world class chiropractic clinic, you need to set up and manage your LinkedIn profile.
Squidoo
Here's one of the weirder tools. It's a brainchild of Seth Godin (if you don't know him, look him up). You basically set up a website where you can set-up a "Lense" (website) that's entirely dedicated to your topic of choice. You could set up a page dedicated to chiropractic and compile all of the most important articles, videos, and websites about that topic. If you did a good job, it could become one of the central resources for chiropractic information on the web.
