Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram attract billions of users daily. With the popularity of these sites, it is not surprising that many patients have turned to social media to share their health experiences or to learn more about their medical conditions.
Social media is a valuable tool that can be used to educate, collaborate, and advocate interactions with patients and the public. As more medical professionals and patients use these sites, you have the obligation to present evidence-based information respectfully and transparently in order to build and maintain trust.
The first step in developing a high-performing social media presence is determining your goals. The more well-defined your objectives, the easier it will be to identify an audience, decide what to share, and measure effectiveness. The most basic aim is connecting with current patients.
Additional goals include the following:
- Providing Health Education to the Public. Education can focus on general topics such as fitness or wellness, or on a topic in which you have particular interest or expertise. How you distribute content on these topics can vary from simply sharing links to news or research. Producing original content in the form of blog posts, podcasts, or videos.
- Promoting Your Practice. A strong social media presence can help you recruit patients to your clinic/hospital, retain current patients, and have more control over your online reputation. For example, when patients search for a physician online before scheduling an appointment, seeing a positive social media presence can alleviate isolated negative reviews they may find.
Connecting with other Medical Professionals. In many ways, social media has become the new “doctors’ lounge.” Social media has allowed many doctors to engage with subspecialists around the world in a virtual doctors’ lounge and participate in conversation chats or question-and-answer sessions.
Advocating for a Cause. You can use social media for advocacy in several different ways: listening to and amplifying the stories of those with particular experiences, and informing people of issues they were previously unaware of.
Sometimes, simply sharing a day-to-day experience in health care can have a meaningful impact. Additionally, medical professionals use social media to mobilize around community issues, ranging from local concerns to discussions about health equity.
Growing your Audience
Once you have identified your goals, you must consider your audience.
Having clear intentions with your audience the message will ultimately lead to a clear brand, by nature of our work and expertise, medical professionals’ voices can attract attention even with just a tweet or two, but a social media following really grows when a doctor has a clear brand on which followers can depend on.
Be Professional. Medical professionals face unique challenges being on social media because the lines between their professional and personal lives can become blurred. Being personable is encouraged; being unprofessional is not. Doctors represent their profession in the way they treat others and in the quality of the information they provide.
Refrain from offering Medical Advice to individuals on social media. It is better to share general educational tips than specific medical advice and, it may be worth noting this to your followers. It is difficult to obtain detailed and verifiable information from online accounts, so you can’t always be sure who you’re talking to online. Furthermore, given the privacy concerns of sharing any personal health data on social media, doctors should discourage others from exposing themselves to unnecessary privacy risks by sharing intimate information.
Be Careful when Posting About Patients. Everything posted on social media is stored forever and owned by the company that runs the platform. Always think before posting: Is this something patients or their family members could see and recognize as their own information? Is this your information to share?
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Written by Farzana Patel
8th December 2023
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