Effective marketing makes the most of every dollar spent. We know that our clients don’t want us to waste a dime of their marketing budgets, and that’s why we are saying “Farewell!” to one of the icons of social media: Twitter.
The Upside of Quitting Twitter
In their book, Freakonomics and corresponding podcast, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk about The Upside of Quitting. The gist is that sometimes you have to realize when it truly is time to walk away from a venture and ignore what everyone else is doing- ignore how much time you’ve put into it, and give up.
We’ve looked at the data and the recent actions of this one-time behemoth of social media marketing, and we made the tough decision to stop working Twitter on behalf of our clients. We owe it to our clients to get the most out of our services and Twitter is just not giving anyone the return that we’d like.
The average client is getting just two visits to their website per year from Twitter. Did you catch that? 2 PER YEAR! Those two visits might even be from the dentists or members of their team. We’re posting multiple times per month and hashtagging and @ing our brains out all for two visits. That’s terrible.
Most of our clients don’t have many followers. We know that Twitter doesn’t like artificially inflated followers, so we don’t pay for followers to our clients’ accounts. And while our clients generally have that little Twitter t next to their Facebook F and the Instagram camera icon on their websites and even sometimes on placards in their offices, patients just don’t care enough about dentistry to follow their dentist on Twitter. Without many followers (an average of 10 followers for accounts we manage, btw), we can’t expect that the average tweet is going to get much attention.
We have never been able to track a new patient lead that came to a client’s office from Twitter. Never. Whereas with Facebook and Instagram, it seems to happen somewhat regularly- just depending on how active our client is in addition to what we do.
Activity on Twitter is even more critical yet difficult when you compare it to Facebook and Instagram. You have to like, reply to, and retweet other Twitter accounts’ posts, and that’s just not something that we can do for our clients. Our clients can’t do it for themselves because they’re lucky if they have time to be active on Facebook and Instagram. I would never counsel a client to work harder on Twitter and risk neglecting the Facebook and Instagram crowd.
I’ll have more on that in an upcoming article that compares marketing with hunting. You have to go where the game is! The fact that patients don’t open their social media apps with the intent of finding dental information has always been the Achilles’ heel of social media marketing for dental practices. We have to use ads on Facebook and Instagram, and Twitter ads haven’t even been a consideration.
Twitter Implosion
We finally made the call to stop posting to Twitter recently when Twitter went on a rampage of suspending Twitter accounts following a massive hack. Accounts of celebrities like President Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk had their accounts restored. Unfortunately, many of our clients were hit with suspensions that may never be lifted. Twitter support consists of help documentation and little else. We’ve reached out to Twitter every way that we know how to but to no result. Add to that the fact that we’ve been limited to signing into just 5 accounts at once, and scaling this activity is effectively impossible.
Everything a dental practice does to market itself must:
- Increase visibility
- Generate new patients
Because Twitter has done neither of these for our clients for some time, we had to give it the axe. This will give us more time to focus on the things that actually work for our offices, so we are proud Twitter quitters. :)
