The use of social media has exploded in the last couple of years, and doctors are also jumping on board.
In an effort to understand how physicians are using social media, WCG, an independent strategic communications firm, created a database of nearly 1,400 doctors on Twitter and linked their profiles to the National Provide Identifier, a unique 10-digit identification number that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid issues to providers in the U.S.
After tracking more than 400,000 tweets over a five-month period this year, the creators of the database came away with a few conclusions. According to a post written on the website of one such physician tweeter and blogger, the findings were:
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- These are active users. They tweet over 2x per day on average.
- Twitter is a part of their work-day. More than 50% of tweets are sent between 9am and 5pm (in the physician’s local time zone).
- They have an audience. 2/3 have at least 150 followers (the median is 306).
- They connect to each other. More than 1/3 of the doctors are followed by at least 20 other doctors in the database.
- The most-followed physician by those in the database was none other than Kevin Pho (the same physician on whose blog, this entry was posted); followed by nearly half of the doctors studied.
The characteristics of the database are not unlike the overall specialty mix and geographic location of the overall physician population in the U.S.
The database creators also wanted to find out what the doctors talk about and decided to analyze a sample of tweets related to diabetes, breast cancer and prostate cancer. A whopping 83 percent of the specialties mentioned the term “diabetes” in tweets.
The database also tracks docs communicating on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit and email. Read more here.
