Future Ear Radio Spotlight: Dr. Natalie Phillips (@AudioDrPhillips)

The more I’ve thought about the goal of Future Ear Radio, the more that I’ve decided I want this to be a vehicle to amplify some of the best content being exchanged around the various themes of FuturEar (hearing aids, hearables, audiology, voice tech, biometrics, etc.). I want to highlight the whole spectrum of content creation, from large news sources down to individuals, so I’ve decided to start a new segment of the daily update that I’ll use occasionally called the, “Future Ear Radio Spotlight.”
This week, I want to shine a light on some of what Dr. Natalie Phillips is doing. Natalie is a senior Audiologist at Advanced Otolaryngology and Audiology in Fort Collins, CO. She hosts a podcast, Connecting a Better World, and is the founder of a consulting agency, Connect4Excellence. Along with all the accolades and her reputation in the audiology community, she does a really good job of helping to educate the hearing healthcare professional community on how to effectively use social media.
Today, she had a guest appearance on a popular Facebook Live show where she spoke to the power of using Twitter in a professional setting. I’m pretty much the biggest advocate of Twitter out there, as I believe a well-curated Twitter feed is a modern marvel and that Twitter can be an incredibly effective networking tool. So, I found myself nodding along to just about everything she said in the video.
The key to using Twitter effectively, as Natalie pointed out, can be boiled down to three things: authenticity, consistency, and engagement. This is spot on. Since there are so many pockets of users on Twitter, the first step is to identify the pocket that you want to join, by looking at people’s tweets who have been around for a while or searching hashtags.
From there, it’s a matter of developing your “brand” and being authentic about it. If you’re just getting started out, the most surefire way to gain a following is to engage the people who are well established and can help pull you into the mix by elevating you through engagement of their own. Consistently engage those folks with retweets and replies, in an authentic manner by putting real thought into what you’re saying and adding value to the conversation. It takes time, but you’ll slowly start to understand what works and what does not. Be yourself, stay on brand, engage the other members of the twitter communities you’re interested in, and do it consistently. That’s the recipe for success with Twitter and with Social Media more broadly.
There’s a ton that we can learn from each other about how to best use all these new tools we have available. Cheers to Natalie for leading the way on how best to use social media as a hearing healthcare professional and sharing all the ways in which she’s found success through her own experience.
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave