Previously on this blog, we've touched on the role that social media can play in your chiropractic marketing strategy, enabling you to connect directly with prospective patients and actually drive more traffic to your practice. By maintaining an informative blog on your website and reaching out to your community via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more, you can both establish yourself as an authority and foster professional relationships with local residents. Today, though, we'll touch on another key aspect of online awareness.

"Digital literacy for doctors is important partly because digital media is so important to patients—often the first place they turn for medical information, before they visit a doctor—and physicians need to be prepared to encounter patients who may be either incredibly well informed or very misinformed by the information they've gathered online," a recent commentary from InformationWeek Healthcare states.

These days, if someone experiences a minor tweak or twinge, they are far more likely to head online to investigate the problem, at least initially. Resources like WebMD and the Mayo Clinic, while incredibly informative, may also lead to troublesome misdiagnoses that can lead individuals to either overlook or enhance the severity of their condition.

It therefore falls to medical professionals, for the sake of patients everywhere, to monitor these outlets—Wikipedia included—so they can evaluate their medical merit. The source notes, for example, that if a someone comes to your practice and asks about the validity of a certain online source, it is in your best interest, and theirs, to at least have a basic familiarity with the channel.

So where do you begin with this process? Why not start with your current clientele?

Try asking some of your regular patients, not to mention friends and family members, where they turn for medical advice online. It may even be worth taking note of this information in a patient's chiropractic EHR, so you maintain a familiarity with their habits that can benefit other physicians as well.