Employer: madison/miles media
Project: Blog post
My role: Writer
Results: Highest-viewed blog post to date for madison/miles media
There’s a bit of debate around doctors interacting with patients or potential patients on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. In general, the two schools of thought go something like this:
On the one hand: Doctors shouldn’t interact with patients in social media because they don’t have time, and doing so contributes to physician burnout. Plus, there’s no way to measure ROI.
On the other hand: Doctors should interact with patients in social media because that’s where patients are. And instead of interacting with just one patient at a time, they can engage a huge population at once.
No surprise here: as a content marketing agency, we fall into the other hand. Three big reasons:
1. More than 50% of millennials look up health information online, and slightly less than 50% of non-millennials do so, according to a 2015 report from Quirk’s Marketing Research. What’s more, 41% of patients search for health information on social media sites, as noted in a 2014 survey by the National Research Corporation.
2. If you’re a physician delivering compelling content, you can bring in new patients using social media. See our earlier blog post that explains how. (Of course, if you want to keep those patients, you have to provide great care in person.)
3. You can provide reliable, useful information via social media sites, which can leave a positive impression on potential patients.