Reaching Social Media success is a complex endeavor; a strong media voice is built in two large pillars: expert medical knowledge and the ability to operate in a multifaceted media environment where marketing expertise is important but not enough. Here are some challenges and considerations for a physician who attempts to amplify their social media voice.
1. Reaching your target patient audience
In our homepage, we outline how PHARMED can amplify your social media presence in nine steps. A critical starting point for any media campaign is to define and later target your patient audience. A dermatologist specializing in teenage acne may need to focus on channels where Generation Z spends their time such as Snapchat, Instagram, Tik Tok. An oncologist may focus on Facebook and Google SEO as well as extensive bogging on their own website. Aside from these examples there are countless of media channel combinations and best practices for reaching the appropriate audience in an effective, ethical and balanced manner and often paid promotion of social media content is critical and has a proven ROI.
2. Having an engaged patient audience
Here is where social media management for physicians differs from any other industry sector. Having an engaged audience literally means that patients create content on your social media, either by sharing experiences or asking direct questions. in such situations a careless post may reveal confidential patient information. PHARMED advises all physicians to carefully monitor their social media content for compliance with the local and global guidelines and regulations. We only post on your behalf having the HIPAA — The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — in mind and we continuously monitor your social profiles for any conduct violations.
3. Carve time in your busy schedule or find the right partner to post on your behalf on social media.
Going public in your communication will take time off your patients and your personal life. A successful post requires carefully curated content that is relevant to your practice, balanced in order to avoid misunderstanding, SEO optimized so it ranks well on search engines, monitoring for performance and all these must happen several times per week. Posting once per month or even once per week is not enough. This is why having a social media partner to represent you is important but for a physician a good marketer is not enough, it may actually lead to significant inaccuracies if the content creator is not a healthcare professional themselves.