Simplify Your Social Media Life With HootSuite

I have wholeheartedly embraced social media to build my therapy practice and to educate the public on important emotional health and family relationship topics.

Technology and social media have allowed me to grow my private practice free of managed care during difficult economic times. Facebook is the #2 referral source to my private practice website, topped only by Google. A common challenge for private practice therapists is learning to effectively manage social networks in a way that maximizes their time and draws people to their practice.

People often ask how I stay on top of posting and interacting regularly on my social media networks. Just to give you an idea, I manage 3 Twitter accounts, 8 Facebook pages/profiles, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Ping.fm, 3 Ning accounts. One of my favorite social network management systems is HootSuite, a social media dashboard. Although I can’t manage all of my accounts from HootSuite, I can manage the largest networks. I pay only $5.99 per month which includes the ability to add one “team member” to can access and manage my social network accounts. Read more

7 Strategies To Revive Your Dead Facebook Page

Copyright All rights reserved by bigbrownhouse

Do you have a Facebook page for your private practice? If not, read these articles first:

How To Set Up A Facebook Page and Facebook Pages For Therapists: Some Risks And Benefits

If you already have a practice Facebook page but there’s very little interaction going on here are a few tips to revive your page. If people aren’t visiting your page and interacting on it, what’s the point of having it, right?

7 Facebook strategies that boost interaction on Facebook:

1) Post on weekends and afternoon/evening

According the Entrepreneur.com, weekends and late afternoons are the times when page admins are least likely to add a new post and those posts that receive the highest interaction rates.

Ok, private practice therapists, you can’t ignore the mobile marketing revolution any longer. I predict that private practitioners who don’t embrace mobile technology will have a difficulty building and maintaining a thriving in the coming years.

Look at these statistics about the astronomical growth of mobile usage predicted over the next few years.

There will be nearly 1 mobile device per capita by the year 2015. That suggests that by 2015 there will be approximately 7.2 billion mobile devices.
Global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015.
There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015. (source: Cisco.com)

Here are 4 ways to get your practice ready for the mobile revolution:Â

1) Visit your practice website on a variety of mobile devices

Have you visited your practice website on a variety or smartphones, iPad, etc. to see if your website is as effective on mobile devices as it is on a computer screen? With more and more people going “mobile only,”Â make sure that your website translates well on smaller mobile screens.

I have four children. Luckily, I still like the names my husband and I gave them. Their names fit them. Their names aren’t too common or too weird. Like naming a child, choosing a practice name that fits can be a difficult process that brings up anxiety for therapists. You want your practice name to be an accurate reflection of you, as a therapist, and also appeal to your ideal clients.Â You don’t want to regret your decision down the road, right?

Ten years ago I wrestled with the question of what to name my practice. Funny enough, it was just one month after my 3rd child was born and weÂ didn’t name him for a couple of days because my husband and I couldn’t agree on his name. The name he’d picked for our son, Joshua, was a fine name but it just wasn’t him. He was Owen, not Joshua. I don’t regret taking a couple of days and “going to bat” for the name that fit my son.

I don’t regret the name I picked for my private practice either. I wrestled with a few different practice options and settled on Wasatch Family Therapy. Here are some common questions about naming your practice and some insight into how I made my decision.

Mobile App For Your Private Practice? It’s Easier Than You Think

By now you know that love technology, especially when it comes to practice building. I recently blogged about how shrinks can prepare for the mobile marketing revolution. Well, here’s another cool way to make sure that your private practice website is “mobile friendly.” You can now build your own private practice app! Seriously.

Last weekend I stumbled on this blog http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57336404-94/how-to-build-your-own-app-for-free/ and thought I’d give it a try.

My clinic website, Wasatch Family Therapy, has an active blog, newsletter, YouTube account, Twitter, and Facebook page and we pride ourselves in being fairly tech-savvy, so an app is the next step, right? In addition to providing clinical services, we highly value outreach and community education and technology and the Internet allow us to reach far beyond our own community in Utah.

In less than an hour, through the tools available on conduit.com I created a custom mobile “Wasatch Family Therapy” app, complete with it’s own QR code (the code you can scan with a bar code scanner on your mobile phone). I was also able to set up a notification to my website visitors using a mobile device to select the app or open the full-version. Cool huh?

Q: Hi…My problem is that my boyfriend broke up with me 2 weeks ago. we already planned to go to Hawaii and I have to go because I can’t pay him back since it’s really expensive. We decided to be friends, when I’m around him I want to be his friend and that’s the only thing I think about but when I’m not around him, I start missing him so much. I keep telling myself that I want him to be my friend nothing more, I don’t want to go to back to him and he doesn’t either but I miss him so much and want to be around him all the time. The trip is in 2 weeks and were gonna spend 10 days together there. I’m scared that I will get hurt and after we get back from Hawaii, I will start missing him more and get hurt even more. Please help me, I seriously have no idea of what to do and no one can help me out. I have finals coming in a week and I really don’t want anything to affect my studying.

A: Don’t go to Hawaii with someone who just broke up with you, even if you have to forfeit money. Focus on your studies and on moving forward with your life. This is a chance to learn how to tolerate missing him, and process the grief. You may want to talk with a counselor through your college.

Click the arrow below to listen to my audio response.

photo credit: janineomg

I’ve Never Met A Shrink Who Didn’t Need One

My grandpa used to say, “I never met a shrink who didn’t need one,” as if that was a valid reason for not seeking help for mental health problems. After being a therapist for nearly two decades, I totally agree with my Grandpa.

Therapists are an interesting and colorful bunch and we definitely have our own share of mental health problems. I’d take grandpa’s phrase even farther by saying I’ve never met a person who didn’t need a shrink. We can all benefit from examining our experiences and getting an outside perspective from a mental health professional during difficult times.

The most effective therapists I’ve worked with, as a colleague and as a client, are those who’ve already worked through some of their own mental health and relationship struggles with a therapist, have a handle on their own pain and vulnerability, understand their family relationship patterns, and are comfortable walking with others through their pain. Not only is working through issues with your own therapist good for your own mental health and personal relationships, it’s also good for your therapy practice.

WordPress is a fantastic platform for your private practice website. Originally a blogging platform, it’s commonly used for websites because it’s user friendly, functional, and easy to customize. I’m completely “in love” with it. For clarification, I’m talking about WordPress.org that is installed on your web hosting system, not WordPress.com – a web-based blogging platform.

Since I changed to WordPress about a year ago for my practice website, I’ve been able to create a more dynamic and interactive website with fresh content, social media interaction, and an integrated a blog.Â So here’s more about why I love WordPress:

Paper Or Electronic? Why I’m Grieving My Paper Files

Call me a bad therapist. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I write my case notes during sessions. It’s not “writing” really. It’s more like “jotting” a few important things down as I go. I sign and date the note at the end of the session and I’m done. Call me crazy, but I like to complete all work, notes, letter writing on behalf of the client during the session. I have resistance to adding and hour or so at the end of my day for case notes.

If you haven’t been able to tell from past posts, I tend to be an early adopter when it comes to technology. I had a therapy website in the early 2000′s. I’ve been on Facebook and Twitter for 4 years (which is a long time for the over 40 crowd). I love my iPhone and iPad. I developed an app. But, I haven’t yet transition to electronic notes and health records, until now.

Starting today my therapy clinic is finally transitioning to an electronic records and practice management system. After a lot of research we decided to go with Care Paths.

Best Of Private Practice Toolbox 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, I wanted to review which posts have had the most views since I launched this blog in August 2011.Â It also gives me an idea of which topics are most relevant and interesting to other mental health private practitioners. Is your favorite article on this list?

Here are the most viewed articles for 2011:

I’d love to know which posts have been most helpful to you in creating your dream practice during 2011.

Do you have any areas of practice that you need help with? Please post any specific private practice questions or practice related topics that you’d be interested in hearing more about in the coming year in the comment box below.

Happy New Year!

1 2 previous posts

Navigate / search

Naming Your Pratice Is Like Naming A Child

Ask Julie: How Do I Get Over My Ex-Boyfriend?

6 Reasons I’m Obsessed With WordPress

Read more