A research on physician use of social media
While some of the top US physician's social accounts have over 4 million followers, the study performed by authors from New York have other numbers to report. They selected the 10 largest US hospitals (2020-2021) for a cross-sectional study to assess the use across different social media (SM) platforms among surgeons and other medical specialties. The total number of participants accounted 650 physicians in 14 specialties. 18.6% of healthcare providers were on Twitter, 23.4% on Facebook and 44.9% on LinkedIn. Interestingly, authors report that 89.3% had 0 monthly posts across all SM platforms. Study findings suggest that, male sex and increased physician age were associated with lower odds of SM presence. That means that female physicians were with a higher likelihood being an active SM users, while more experienced physicians (especially surgeons) posted more on SM and had more followers. Check out more detailed results by the link.