5 productive tips for provider social media
Streamline your social media partnership with physicians by using these five tips.
Streamline your social media partnership with physicians by using these five tips.
Author: Kirsten Lecky
Last updated: 05/22/24
The right physician experts can mean marketing gold for healthcare social media teams. But content needs, evolving formats and platforms, and limited schedules can get in the way. Whether you’re building a health content library, creating short-form videos for health information or developing a physician thought-leadership program, these five tips will help your marketing team successfully partner with doctors on social media.
Engaging doctors on social media strengthens your hospital’s online presence in these key ways:
Beyond these benefits, doctors on social media can improve their personal brand and professional network through online collaboration, thought leadership and mentorship. This reflects positively on the health system, attracting patients seeking qualified care as well as younger physicians who are comfortable with social media. Provider social media also empowers patients through targeted health education. When doctors address specific concerns in their area of expertise, they combat misinformation and promote preventive care.
Doctors are busy! Make the most of their time. When interviewing a provider for social media content, give them the questions ahead of time. Record several videos at once if you get time on their calendar for taping. Then, repackage clips into bite-sized social media posts and blog content to use throughout the year.
One doctor at our recent Ask a Doc session at this year’s Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (HMPS) said they record videos for all new doctor hires as part of their onboarding process.
Once you have the content, make social sharing simple. Develop social media post templates with customizable sections where doctors can easily insert their insights and expertise. Tag your doctors’ social media handles in your organization’s content. Cross-tagging lets you efficiently alert providers when their content is live on your social media channels. Then, they can quickly reshare with their audiences.
Doctors value and protect the time they have for patient care. If you’re lucky enough to have a doctor who wants to be part of campaigns and education, keep their focus on supporting patient care and patient questions.
Make the content educational. Rapid, thoughtful responses to trending health topics can help keep medical misinformation at bay. And put your provider in their patients’ shoes by focusing on common patient concerns and questions.
While trending topics can offer quick wins, creating evergreen content gives you power in the long term.
This strategy is particularly effective when creating health education content with providers who have sub-specialties. Unique health content educates the community and other providers, which can help grow referral networks. Having evergreen content available in your content library allows you to quickly refresh and update when news and health trends arise.
Get more healthcare marketing tips and best practices: Subscribe to the WG Content newsletter!
Personality matters. Just like you want doctors to shine in their provider profiles, social media and video content offer opportunities to show your provider’s human side. These examples show engaging social posts.
@theoncdoc lets make those facing the hardest times, shared times. support those #workingwithcancer
♬ original sound – Sanjay Juneja, M.D.
@dr.carmenfong219 Urinary retention is sometimes a problem after hemorrhoid surgery and is a result of nerves in the pelvic area telling your body that you’re in pain so your pelvic floor muscles tighten up in an effort to prevent any further pain or injury. That’s how I explain it to my patients. It’s a sympathetic response. This can also happen after other perineal surgeries or injuries, including giving birth vaginally and having a perineal tear repaired. When my patients call me after surgery and tell me they can’t pee, I advise them to try at-home measures first to avoid a trip to the ER and most commonly this will be sitting in a bathtub of warm water just about 2 inches or so to cover your perineum or butt area and you don’t need Epsom salts or anything, but the warm water helps the muscles relax. And you can even pee or poop in the bathtub if you have to that first time. Better than going to the ER. This happened to me after giving birth, at first I didn’t realize what was happening. My abdomen felt so full and I only had small drops of pee when I went to the bathroom, but felt the urge to pee. There was no pain, but you can have almost like a flushed/sweaty/clammy feeling in your body. Thankfully, I followed my own advice and was able to pee in about 20 minutes and peed normally after that once the muscles were relaxed. Drink a lot of water, too. If you can’t pee, you can’t poop and vice versa, it’s true, you can try it and try holding one in or the other without holding both. It’s very hard because of the way the pelvic floor muscles are intertwined. I am so thankful to have had this experience because I can tell my patients confidently that what I’ve been trained to tell them actually works! Urinary retention doesn’t usually signify problems in the future, but it is something that needs to be taken care of because it can be very uncomfortable and require a trip to the ER for a urinary catheter if you haven’t peed in over 8 to 12 hours or so, or if there are other issues like bleeding. #pelvicfloor #IMMO#InMyMedicalOpinion#yourfriendlyneighborhoodcolorectalsurgeon#pooguru#poopoochatter#womeninscience#womeninmedicine#womeninsurgery#colon#postpartum#newmom
♬ original sound – Dr. Carmen Fong, MD, FACS
Educate your providers on the dos and don’ts of healthcare social media, highlighting HIPAA, Stark and other concerns. Keep your hospital’s social media policy up-to-date and ensure your doctors understand what they can and can’t share. For example, you might recommend that they only reshare patient stories already on your hospital’s social media account.
By fostering a strong partnership with providers, hospital marketing teams can transform their doctors into social media powerhouses, strengthening your brand and theirs. If you need help making the most of physician social media posts and long-form content, WG Content can help. Our network of healthcare content marketing strategists are experts in all aspects of the content process, and excel at physician interviews and creating custom health content.
Social media allows people to access health information on their own time and devices. Doctors and healthcare organizations can use social media to directly share research and reliable health information and combat misinformation.
Social media can be a powerful platform for providers to connect with other physicians worldwide, beyond conferences and interest groups. Provider social media can also include thought leadership, such as research, resource sharing and trending topics.
Community-focused, evergreen health content packaged in multiple formats is perfect for rolling out over the year. Teams can use provider interviews to create long-form content, short social media posts and videos to complete an entire campaign.
Sign up for WG Content’s newsletter, Content Counts.
Learn how to get your organization involved during Heart Month...
Aligning your content marketing with metrics and strategy helps with...
A gap analysis is the best place to start when...
All Rights Reserved. Site by Reason One