The social media platform Twitter continues to gain an outstanding amount of traction in the healthcare community. As new adopters sign up for the service, new voices are added to the conversations that takes place in the Twittosphere. As the Healthcare community grows on Twitter, so do new and exciting tools to help enhance the way the community uses Twitter. Whether you are a fresh face to Twitter or an old vet, here are five useful tools to enhance your healthcare social media experience.
One of my favorite tools to send and analyze the reach of my tweets is Buffer. Buffer is a service that allows the user to schedule and queue up tweets (Facebook & Linkedin posts too!) for future posting. As you come across an interesting article about ACL surgery, you can schedule it for post in Buffer. As long as you keep your Buffer queue full, you’ll have content consistently trickling out at set posting times. After you send your tweet through Buffer you have the ability to see how large of an audience your tweet touched. Buffer offers some wonderful add-ons and extensions for a variety of different platforms. Depending on how much you love Buffer, you can upgrade for its pretty powerful free account to an even more awesome pro account that allows multiple profiles and extra buffer space.If you’re interested in seeing the ups and downs of your Twitter following in a graph form, check out TwitterCounter. Personally, I love to look at and analyze social media statistics. TwitterCounter displays analytics regarding your tweets and your followers. You can peruse the website to look at your data or have them deliver their insights directly into your email box. TwitterCounter offers a free level and paid level. The paid level offers quite a bit more information than the free/basic level.Twitter is a great platform for building, growing, and engaging throughout the healthcare community. Commun.it is a tool that lets you do all of those things and do it well. Using Commun.it allows you to generate leads based on your interests, analyze new follower data, as well as who is no longer following you. If you are looking to organize your Twitter community and engage with a tool to help you manage you Twitter community, Commun.it is the way to go.In the healthcare community one of the greatest uses of Twitter is the hashtag chat. Physicians, patients, community managers and more sit down at the computers and share ideas and strategies on a variety of topics. If you are new to Twitter or just need some help navigating the hashtag world, take a peek at the Hashtag Project. Symplur has organized a wonderful list of healthcare related hashtags, as well as chat sessions.Another wonderful tool for sorting through the Twitter static is the search engine Topsy. Topsy is a real-time search engine to focus on social media. If you are looking to get down and dirty with content research or see what the hot topic in healthcare social media is, Topsy can help you do it. The search engine allows you to search a whole spectrum of time periods on platforms like Twitter and Google+.
These are just a few of the amazing tools available on Twitter that can help you dig deeper and build your online community. What are some Twitter tools you use?
