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For most of my doctor’s friends, “social media” is either “irrelevant”, or a dirty word for their professional lives.

“Why do I have to engage in social media?” Many doctors see social media only for teenagers, “Facebook generation,” sharing, sometimes, “oversharing” the trivial details of their normal lives. “Garrulous”, I believe, is the right adjective. Using it gave the impression of too “forwarding”, unfitting for professional image of doctors.

Although almost every doctor has some level of online presence, very few have active social media activities around their practice. Most of their websites appear to be static content pages with little interest in engaging the visitors for further conversation other than an email address.

These “shy” doctors missed valuable opportunities for building and maintain trust with patient, spreading out their knowledge, especially around preventative measures.

This is why: Firstly, it is finally possible to amplify individual doctor’s influence for negligible cost. As a physician engaged in social media, they provide health related information for a wider audience than just the patients they see in your practice every day. Those with trusting relationship with their readers can influence the behavior of people. The value they add is to provide important patient education amidst a sea of misinformation online, which often left their patient paralyzed for any decisions. In addition, they can discuss issues they truly care about and potentially improve the health of many people.

So as the “curator” of vast amount of online healthcare information, the doctors can use social media to effectively build trust with their patients. Corollarily, the trust leads better patient acquisition and retention.

Also, a lesser format for this communication channel exists already. Many practices offer primary care service via email for any specific questions, with service level agreements, for a fee. This not only generates additional income with opportunities that can be leveraged, but also, it reduces the overall service cost of healthcare while potentially servicing the patients better through earlier chance of diagnosis or intervention.

Although mastering social media takes time, by follow a few steps, one can build up social media presence in no time:

• Regardless what your choice of platform is, the first step is to get “Social.” To start, engage with prospects through sharing, commenting and liking. This is key to building trust and relationships and understanding the conversation on the platform before you dive in with your own content.
• Build your profile with one of the general social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which is Google preferred and can improve the search engine ranking.
• If you are wondering which social network is the most suitable for the doctors? Here is the rule of thumb for use cases amongst these three: If you want to chat with friends, go for Facebook. If you want to get inspired by ideas, not people, every day, go for Twitter. If you want to get serious work done with people you trust, LinkedIn is your best bet.
• Build a profile with a social media network dedicated to physicians, such as Doximity. This profile facilitates HIPPA-secured case collaboration, physician messaging and curated medial news.
• Update your practice website with social media links, such as Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Handle.
• Now, your basic social media infrastructure is established. You can start creating quality contents such as blogging regularly, even creating video, just like Dr. Hamilton, the pediatrician in Santa Monica, whose YouTube video on calming a crying baby within seconds went viral.
• Finally, establish your practice’s web presence as the foundation of your content and social strategy, in addition to your profile. It is recommended that you share relevant content on your company page on a daily basis.

This may still sound overwhelming. But whether the doctors are prepared or not, social media is here to stay. “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Fortunately, there are plenty of professional services that can help one to navigate the new social media journey. To gauge what aspect and what kind of experts you need, you might want to start by taking a digital survey to understand your social media quadrant – see Medology360 Digital Survey download.