Showing posts with label Social Media Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media Tools. Show all posts

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Social Media Tools For Physicians?


Whether you are an avid tweeter, write a blog, or are a novice to professional social media, your online presence has the power to connect you with potential patients just down the street or colleagues working on similar research across the world..


Having a strong online voice is part of your brand. 

Any communication by or about you, such as your name being listed on your practice's website, is part of your brand.

Taking control of how you are perceived by others helps to build your professional reputation. Whether you want to expand your practice, find colleagues to collaborate with, or are looking for career opportunities, your reputation is key to achieving your goals.

In a recent article on branding, we brought you tips on how to define and establish your brand. Here, we delve deeper into how to capitalize on the most useful professional social media platforms for physicians.


LinkedIn: Bringing The World To You

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, with more than 500 million registered users worldwide.


Half of these users are college graduates, and 45 percent report household incomes of $75,000 or more per year.

Kevin Pho, M.D. - an internal medicine physician and co-author of the book Establishing, Managing and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices - sees several benefits from having a LinkedIn profile. "LinkedIn is a low-threat, low-resource, high-yield action," he said.

Unlike physician rating sites, a social media profile offers more control over how you are presented, Dr. Pho explained. Also, LinkedIn profiles are ranked highest out of all social media platforms, reducing the impact of negative news or physician rating sites.

After registering at LinkedIn.com, create the most thorough profile possible, recommended Jeffrey Benabio, M.D., in an article published on Medjobnetwork.com.

The more complete your profile is, the higher it ranks. The basic information to share is your education, medical expertise, areas of interest, professional experience, the address and phone number of your practice, and links to your website (if you have one).



To make the most of your LinkedIn profile, follow these simple steps:
  • Upload a picture of yourself looking professional but approachable.
  • Personalize your headline.
  • Add keywords, including the name and location of your practice.
  • List at least five of your strongest skills as a physician.
  • Search for colleagues already on LinkedIn and invite them to connect.
  • Join LinkedIn groups that match your interests.
  • Be active by commenting on others' posts and sharing articles of interest, including your own.
  • Finally, customize your profile URL, and include it in your email signature.
LinkedIn allows you to build up a substantial network of connections, communicate directly with other members, post updates, share stories from other outlets, and importantly, track who has viewed your profile.

Doximity: Catering to HCP's

While LinkedIn is low in physician resources, Doximity is high.


Similar to LinkedIn but exclusive to healthcare professionals in the United States, Doximity connects more than 800,000 of them - 600,000 of which are physicians.

"Doximity has emerged as the core professional profile for doctors and one that's totally within the physician's control," said Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. - director of community medicine for the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition for Texas Children's Hospital in Houston - in his blog. "It's the first place I go to update my professional status as it changes."

Creating your profile is easy; you can automatically upload your CV. Conveniently, Doximity keeps your CV updated by scanning the web for information about your latest achievements.

It doesn't stop there. Doximity profile updates are also immediately reflected in U.S. News & World Report physician profiles.

Including your clinical interests allows you to receive the most relevant referrals and news from their DocNews newsfeed. The site also lets you know when your work is being discussed in online conversations.

In addition to connecting physicians with job offers, the site offers CME/CE credits, a residency navigator, and an annual salary survey.



For communicating with your patients, a free digital fax and messaging service provides HIPAA-secure communication from any mobile device. Another tool displays your office number when you call patients from your cell phone.

Between its far-reaching network and well-conceived resources, Doximity expands your influence while boosting your practice on the most practical levels.

Twitter: Big Impact in Small Bites

The microblogging site lets you make an impact in 140-character posts called "tweets." Quotes and attached media are excluded from the character count. While anyone can read tweets, only registered users can post them.

Tweets often include photos and links. Hashtags (such as #cancer) identify terms and help to organize information. The names, or "handles," of other users are preceded by the @ symbol (such as @mnt).

Physicians usually follow other physicians, allowing them to interact with colleagues interested in the same news, advances, or advocacy.



"On Twitter you can follow thought leaders in any area of medicine and healthcare," Dr. Pho explained. "I have a Twitter list that has 40 healthcare thought leaders that I follow dozens of times a day. To me it's one of the most powerful ways to stay up to date in my area of medicine and healthcare."

Twitter can also bring you the latest news from major medical journals, including pre-published articles as well as policy updates and educational events.

The platform is especially useful for getting insight into patients' perspectives, as many patients and advocacy groups tweet regularly.

Through Twitter, you can even attend medical conferences virtually, by following attendees' tweets. Sharing research findings is easy and can lead to new collaborations.

In 2015, the California Association of Family Physicians (AFP) took to Twitter for vaccine legislation.

Up for debate was a bill that would end personal belief exemptions for vaccines. Going up against thousands of Twitter comments opposing the bill, the California AFP formed a coalition with pediatricians and public health officials, tweeting to educate patients and the media.

The result saw California become the third state to ban personal belief exemptions for vaccines.



To add your voice to Twitter, sign up for a free account on Twitter.com. Then, create a profile that includes your name, credentials, and a picture. Search by using hashtags to find the topics most pertinent to you.

Begin by following the physicians and thought leaders who interest you, and "retweet" the most insightful ones. Once you start tweeting your own thoughts and links to original articles, be ready to field the responses.

A record of all your tweets is conveniently stored on your home page.

YouTube: Patients See You in Action

While Twitter plugs you into the latest research and gives you a forum to share yours, YouTube can be even more personal.

A short video introducing yourself allows potential patients to start getting to know you before even making an appointment.

YouTube videos can also be a way to educate patients about your services, without any overt marketing.

Orthopedic surgeon C. Noel Henley, M.D., uses YouTube videos to put patients at ease about their upcoming surgeries.



On his blog, he said, "This week, my patient requested a specific procedure. We agreed it should be done, and [...] I fired up my iPad in the office and showed him a 2-minute video of the procedure I created and uploaded to YouTube using free software [...] He was crystal clear on the procedure and prepared for what will happen in a few weeks."

In addition to educating and reassuring existing patients, a YouTube channel can also bring new clients to your door. Using video clips, you can explain illnesses, perform exercises, or demonstrate early detection techniques.

Dr. Henley wrote, "YouTube sends my practice website a large percentage of my best monthly traffic. Last month, the visitors from my YouTube channel stayed on my website longer than most people, and viewed more pages than average."

"This makes sense: a person who watches one of my videos is already interested in my information and wants to know more - before they arrive on my website. If you want to be found by patients, you need to be on YouTube before your local competition figures this out."

To get started, sign up for a free YouTube account. Search for channels relevant to your field, and see what the competition is doing.



Once you're ready to try your hand at it, invest in a high-quality camera. Ensure that you have enough lighting and excellent audio. Choose a setting appropriate to the topic. Videos can be edited with a free tool such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.

To get the most out of your channel:
  • Add a professional profile picture to help legitimize your channel.
  • Link back to your practice website, to your other social media accounts, and to similar YouTube channels.
  • End the video by encouraging viewers to subscribe to your channel and directing them to your website.
  • Take advantage of YouTube's free tracking tool to see which videos are most popular. This shows you what additional videos and web pages your viewers might like.
Hootsuite: Tying it All Together

When using multiple social media platforms, one simple tool can make you much more efficient: Hootsuite.

While both free and paid versions are available, the free version allows you to manage three social media profiles and track follower growth.



It also shows you which content you post is most popular, lets you schedule content to post, and integrates two RSS feeds that find and share content from sources you choose.

Dr. Pho turns to the tool to monitor Twitter conversations, as well as any mentions of his handle and his name, and to manage pages and posts on various social media platforms.

"The free version is powerful enough for the majority of physicians," said Dr. Pho. "It's an essential social media tool and I highly recommend it to any physician using social media."

As you ease into social media, start small. Dr. Vartabedian noted, "It doesn't take much. Share your successes and tell some stories on a LinkedIn page and a Twitter account, and you're off to the races."

Guest Authored By Lisa Chontos. Lisa is a Freelance Medical Writer specializing in marketing and consumer health, and French & Spanish translation into English. Follow Lisa on Twitter.





"Having a strong online voice is part of your brand.

Any communication by or about you, such as your name being listed on your practice's website, is part of your brand.

Taking control of how you are perceived by others helps to build your professional reputation.

Whether you want to expand your practice, find colleagues to collaborate with, or are looking for career opportunities, your reputation is key to achieving your goals.."

    • Authored by:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Monday, March 30, 2026

    Getting Your Social Media Content Shared?


    Your branded social media presences have a lot of potential to drive engagement with relevant audience members, but that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the potential for engagement impact via peer-to-peer social shares..



    There are a few key reasons why making sure people share your content is to your advantage as a marketer.

    Prospective customers trust peer shares more than brand shares, with research showing that 92% of consumers trust influencers more than advertisements or celebrity endorsements. What’s more, social media newsfeed algorithms favor posts from people over posts from brands, and fast-rising share counts have been known to trigger Google bots to index items more rapidly.

    The reach implications are also huge. The more diverse your sharers are, the more diverse and wider your audience potential is. When you consider that 69% of the American population uses at least some type of social media, there are plenty of people out there to reach.

    The more your message is shared, the more opportunities there will be for interested people to see it. Let’s take a look at six of the most powerful tools that can help maximize the peer-to-peer social share rates for your content.



    1. Smarp

    Your employees are often your most valuable secret weapon when it comes to building traction with social media. People trust employees twice as much as they do your CEO, a senior executive, or an activist consumer. And, on average, brand messages are shared 24 times more frequently when they're distributed by employees.

    An app designed for employee communication and advocacy, Smarp presents users with a familiar-looking social feed interface of branded and otherwise relevant content items that they can easily schedule for posting across their networks.

    You can use the app to keep your team up to date with everything that's going on within your company, and make it easier for them share their knowledge, to help build their personal brands and assist with your company’s social selling efforts. Modules for gamified rewards and tracking ROI help marketers to double down on what’s working.



    2. Social Locker

    What’s more valuable to your nurture funnel, access to a few people’s inboxes or an army of social media advocates? It might be worth finding out. Social Locker is a WordPress plugin that provides a bit of a spin on the “gated content” concept.

    Most website visitors aren't going to be motivated on their own to share your content, so they’ll often ignore social share buttons. Even when people like your content, they may forget to share it, or may not do so simply because they don't know how important it is to you.

    Here, instead of asking people to consent to email follow up messages in exchange for accessing a premium resource, you’re asking them to share it. Essentially, this tool makes it easy for you to hide your most valuable content behind a set of social media buttons. Audience members won't see the content until they tweet, share, like or +1 the landing page.



    3. Quuu Promote

    People who want to position themselves as niche experts can automate the sharing of topic-specific content items with their social circles. Posting curated, relevant, third-party articles are a key activity for aspiring influencers, and Quuu makes it easy for free. But where does all that great content come from?

    Here’s the true brilliance of their model. Its sister platform, Quuu Promote, is where anyone can open an account and submit a URL for paid promotion. Once human quality control moderators approve your item, it’ll be added to the pool of suggested topic-specific posts for other users to approve and dispatch over the course of two months.

    Items on rotation in this tool generally see several hundred shares and clickthroughs (CTR), and the platform’s new monthly subscription plans make it easy to justify posting regularly.



    4. Blog Pros

    Another paid content amplification platform, Blog Pros connects your posts to real people across social media to increase the number of shares your content receives. This system checks your blog RSS feed for new content, and when it finds the new content, your post is assigned to people for promotion. No submission necessary – just new people sharing your latest items with their interested followers, within 12 hours of it going live.

    When people share your content with their audience, you're not only getting more traffic to your website, but you're also getting a chance to earn new fans and followers. Let's say Jane finds your content, and she loves it so much she decides to look at some of your other pieces. She decides she wants to be kept updated when you have new posts, so she subscribes to your email alerts and likes your Facebook Page. She shares your content, and some of her friends find the same value.

    Moving forward, these engaged advocates may interact with you and share content for you, without needing to be connected through Blog Pros.



    5. Triberr

    Content shares can be a type of currency in the social media influence game, which is what makes Triberr such an effective content discovery and amplification platform. Here is where people can connect with one another based on their levels of influence in specific niches, building out “tribes” of like-minded peers who share each other’s published assets.

    When you join for free, this tool gives you the option of auto-importing your blog posts, to make it easier for you to share the content with people in your tribes.

    You can search for existing tribes, or build your own, based on your interests – so you can find people who are interested in the content you're sharing. Share content from tribe members, and they'll do the same for you. Actively participating in tribes can help you build relationships and connections, which can help you with far more than building your social shares.



    6. Flipboard

    Flipboard is best known as a mobile news reader app that offers a beautiful content consumption experience. But it’s also a great social media content distribution channel, especially since the company started aggressively rolling out new features about two years ago. It now gives you a better way to organize your content, and allows you to highlight content you've already shared on social to keep it fresh for people who may have missed the original posting.

    It’s also easier than ever to build out and automate the refreshment of themed “magazines,” any publisher can join as a content source for readers and magazine curators to subscribe to, and the relatively recently re-launched web app is now a full-featured platform. You can connect any RSS feed and a variety of social networks – including Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, Flickr and Tumblr – to aggregate content from there into your brand’s Flipboard magazine.

    Whereas most social platforms are all about peer network-based content discovery, on Flipboard, it’s all about the topics, which means that as long as your content is relevant and engaging, it’ll be easily found. Follow and share buttons are all over the place in the super clean interface, and content providers are feeling the impact, with some seeing more mobile traffic referred from Flipboard than even LinkedIn and Pinterest.



    Real People for Real Results

    Using any combination of these platforms will help you promote your content across social media.

    Sure, you can always ask your friends and family to share your content, but when you have the same people sharing it all the time, it doesn't necessarily yield the diverse, growing reach you need.

    The more your content gets shared, the greater the chance for increased engagement. And increased engagement tells the social media newsfeed algorithms more of your fans and followers need to see your content in their feeds – which helps build more organic reach.

    Guest Authored By Hurera Sheikh. Hurera is a Copywriter and Sales Strategist at Webee Inc, and Contributor at Huffington Post. Follow Hurera on Twitter.





    The more your content gets shared, the greater the chance for increased engagement.

    And increased engagement tells the social media newsfeed algorithms more of your fans and followers need to see your content in their feeds – which helps build more organic reach..

      • Authored by:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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      Friday, April 4, 2025

      Using Social Media To Market Yourself?


      One of the most common questions I get asked is how business owners can use social media to market themselves..



      There seems to be a lot of information out there, in terms of how to use social media to market yourself.

      With new tools being made available all the time, and older tools acquiring new features (I’m looking at you Instagram!), it’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.


      The good news is, you can use social media in small ways to market yourself. At the end of the day, it’s a whole lot of little actions that can add up over time in a big way. Keep that in mind, as you implement social media using these simple, small tactics:

      1. Show Behind-the-Scenes

      Do you want to know what audiences on social media love? Behind-the-scenes content! I’m serious—they eat it up!


      I’m going to go out on a limb here, and assume that the reason why behind-the-scenes content is so popular is because we crave to see public figures and businesses that are willing to pull back the curtain and show us their real lives. In the intangible yet constantly connected digital world, we ironically crave to make real connections.


      One of the ways you can do this is by using the Stories feature on Instagram or Snapchat (if you’re still into it). For example, I make short videos, where I explain marketing concepts as I’m working on them. This gives a behind-the-scenes look into my business as well as provides value for social media followers. It doesn’t take a whole lot to do this either; the videos are literally 10 seconds long. It’s simply a matter of remembering to do it.

      2. Live-stream While You're Working

      A few days ago, I was interviewing the founder of a local meetup group for freelancers for my podcast. I posted about it on Instagram, and I instantly received requests to live-stream the interview. Since the people asked for it, we gave it to them.


      It ended up being an excellent idea. Not only did I show viewers how I set up for a podcast interview (that’s the behind-the-scenes stuff I was talking about above), we also took live questions from the audience while I was recording. This was a hit—and all we had to do was fire-up Instagram and start recording a live video of something we were already doing anyway!


      So, rather than trying to invent new content all the time, you can use social media to show people what you’re already up to.

      3. Share Wins

      Another small way you can use social media is to share wins with your audience, as they happen in real-time. Did you get featured in the press? Snap a picture of the article and post it on social. Did you hit a new milestone? Post about it on Facebook. Did a client text you an amazing testimonial? Ask them for permission to use it, take a screenshot of it, and put it on Instagram.

      Guest Authored By Amanda Abella. Amanda is a full-time writer who specializes in online business and finance. She's also an online business coach and the Amazon best-selling author of Make Money Your Honey. Follow Amanda on Twitter.





      The Bottom Line

      It’s not difficult to use social media to market yourself, if you remember that it’s all about small actions adding up over time.

      Using social media in some of the aforementioned ways can help you take things one step at a time and eliminate any potential for becoming overwhelmed..


        • Authored by:
          Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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