Digital marketing for dermatologists 102

By Emily Margosian, assistant editor

Use these essentials to get started with social media — or take your online presence to the next level When Facebook first came to be in the mid-aughts, its primary audience consisted of only a small group of students at Harvard University. Nearly 15 years later, Americans now use on average three different forms of social media, according to Pew Research Center, with over 213 million active social media users in the United States according to data from Statista. What was once a novel distraction for college students is now an inextricable part of everyday life — so much so that social media outages on popular platforms often make mainstream news.

Health care is no exception to this trend. Patients now use social media to search for health information, find new providers, and leave feedback on their care — with online reviews in particular having an increasingly influential impact on physicians’ reputations and ability to attract new patients. Dermatologists who may not have seen the need to maintain professional social media in the past are now adjusting to a new era where web proficiency often denotes professionalism and patients are carefully vetting their doctors’ online presence before the first appointment is even scheduled.

Last month, Dermatology World addressed website marketing basics in “Digital marketing for dermatologists 101.” This month, the series continues as social media experts weigh in on:

The value of setting social media goals
HIPAA compliance and social media safety
How to create quality content

Step 1: Set your social media goals

While social media can be an important tool to help your practice meet its marketing and organizational goals, it’s important to clearly outline what those goals are. Avoid a messy online debut by first answering these four questions:

Audience: Who are you trying to reach?

Before deciding on platform, content strategy, or any other logistics, dermatologists should start by identifying who their target audience will be. Whether the focus is on current patients, prospective patients, or even other health care professionals, establishing who you’re trying to target on social media will help you better create content that appeals to that demographic down the road. If you’re unsure of where to start, begin by evaluating your current patient and referral base. “The easiest way to figure out your audience is to look at which kind of patients you’re primarily seeing,” explained Maxim Polansky, MD, a dermatology resident at Emory University School of Medicine. “If you’re practicing in Florida, your focus may be more on baby boomers. If you’re seeing a lot of patients in New York City, you may be courting a younger patient population with more of an interest in cosmetics.”

Platform: Which outlet is best for you and your practice?

Once you’ve determined your target audience, it’s time to pick a platform. Often the two go hand-in-hand. “In general, younger people tend to use Instagram, whereas older users gravitate more toward Facebook,” said Dr. Polansky. “I personally think it’s more difficult to create an engaging Facebook page for the general population to really follow, and it’s more difficult to track the metrics of how many people are visiting your page and what they’re looking at.”

While there are many options to choose from, each platform has its own posting schedule, prime audience, and etiquette, making it important for dermatologists to weigh the pros and cons before diving in. While a particularly charismatic or video-savvy physician could utilize YouTube successfully to boost awareness of their practice or personal brand, for others, a platform like Instagram could yield similar results while investing significantly less time and resources. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that you need to be on every platform possible,” said Danielle Tokarz, AAD social media specialist. “Dermatologists are extremely busy people and there just isn’t enough time in the day to adequately maintain a presence on every outlet. The key is to start with one or two platforms and familiarize yourself with the level of commitment it takes to update those pages on a daily basis.”

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Overall business goal: What are you trying to achieve?

One of the most important steps in the social media planning process is to clearly outline what your objectives are. Whether it’s primarily to educate patients, share success stories, or build a patient base — content should consistently reflect and contribute toward the end goal. One way to stay on-track is to conduct periodic audits of each social media channel to ensure it has a clear purpose with a designated person in charge of posting. Sporadic or random content will waste time and yield little results, said Tokarz. “Never underestimate the power of planning when it comes to your social media presence. Create a strategy with a clear set of goals and editorial calendar to organize everything you want to share over the month.”

Metrics: How will you know if you’re succeeding?

After establishing your target audience, preferred platform(s), and overall objectives, it’s time to decide which metrics you’ll use to measure your social media success. Ideally, these should align with your larger objectives. For example, if your goal for social media is primarily to be an educational resource for patients, key metrics could include number of followers and website traffic. If your goal is, however, to advertise services and attract new patients, metrics could involve tracking appointment bookings or customer inquiries. Engagement (which measures the public shares, likes, and comments generated by your social media profile), is also an important metric to consider when evaluating social media performance. Keep your profile’s engagement high by following other profiles, liking and leaving comments, and replying to other pages to gain exposure.

Q: What separates good vs. bad social media content? What are some common mistakes?

A: Some big issues are frequently posting low-quality content or being overly promotional or self-serving.

These days, good content is all about promoting transparency and communicating with your audience authentically. It incorporates high-quality graphics, well-composed copy, and speaks to the audience in a quick but effective manner — remember how quickly we scroll through feeds nowadays! Content should also offer something of value — whether that be a resource, tip, article link, or just some words of advice — there should be an objective behind everything that is posted. The number one rule should be quality over quantity; not posting just to post.

— Danielle Tokarz, AAD social media specialist

STEP 2: HIPAA COMPLIANCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA SAFETY

With great power comes great responsibility. While social media can be a powerful marketing tool, it also puts practices at increased risk of committing HIPAA violations and more vulnerable to attacks from cyber criminals. Dermatologists should proceed with caution before posting any patient-adjacent content to social media, including before-and-after photos, images of their waiting rooms, or treatment results. “All posts on social media are unsecured PHI by their very nature,” explained Daniel Shay, Esq., in a March 2018 Dermatology World Legally Speaking column. While dermatologists are generally cautious to avoid violating HIPAA, common misconceptions about the law and how it relates to social media can still land them in legal trouble. “Verbal consent, or even informal written consent to post the information is insufficient to satisfy HIPAA,” Shay explained. “Instead the physician must obtain an authorization from the patient.”

HIPAA authorization checklist:

A clear description of the information that will be used and how it will be used
An expiration date (if applicable — or “none” if inapplicable) for the authorization
The patient’s signature and date of signature
Statements that the patient’s continued treatment is not conditioned on their signing of the authorization

Faiyaaz Kalimullah, MD, a dermatologist in private practice in Chicago, said that HIPAA compliance has remained a priority throughout his practice’s expansion into social media and digital marketing. “Our attorney drafted a special consent form for promotional use of patient photographs and procedure videos,” he said. “Only patients who specifically consent for their images to be used on our website or our social media pages are ever featured. This consent is different from our standard photography consent that all patients sign in order for us to store clinical photos in their medical record.”

Legally speaking

Can posting about patients on social media get you into trouble? Learn more at staging.aad.org/dw/monthly/2018/march/can-posting-about-patients-on-social-media-get-you-into-trouble.

To help avoid any legal risks, physicians and their practices should establish clear policies around the use of social media, including:

● Limit publishing to specific team members.

Clearly define which staff members are responsible for posting and have access to the practice’s social media accounts. This helps decrease vulnerability to phishing and password theft, and also reduces the chance of a well-meaning staff member accidentally publishing non-compliant content. Dr. Kalimullah’s practice opted to hire a digital marketing firm to assist with their web and social presence. “Our social media is a collaborative effort between our marketing company and our staff,” he said. “We meet with our marketing company on a monthly basis at which time they review planned posts on our Facebook and Instagram pages.”

● Implement pre-publishing review.

Social media management platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Cyfe, and others, are useful tools that allow users to pre-schedule and edit social media posts to avoid having to manually create and publish every post in real-time. “These are great tools for scheduling your content in advance and determining the best times to share your posts,” said Tokarz. “The Academy uses Sprout Social, which allows you to input your copy, images, or videos, and see how it will be formatted on the platform of your choice, and helps choose the best time to post it with the help of the ‘optimal send time’ feature — which is calculated by an analysis of your audience and the popular times they use that platform.”

While pre-publishing review can be useful for creating content calendars and double-checking typos, it can also be a safeguard to ensure that all outgoing social content is compliant with the practice’s internal policies and any legal requirements. “I think social media etiquette is of the utmost importance to our field as a whole, and to each individual dermatologist,” said Dr. Polansky. “Whatever you put online will be there forever in one form or another. All it takes now is a screenshot, so be mindful about what you’re going to post, and whether or not it will be okay for everybody to see.”

● Moderate user-generated content.

HIPAA violations on a practice’s social media pages can also stem from patients themselves, and comment sections in particular are hotspots for inadvertent sharing of protected information. While disabling comments altogether might sound tempting, doing so can negatively impact a page’s overall engagement. Instead, physicians may want to consider assigning a specific staff member to moderate comment sections and address problems as they arise. In general, Dr. Polansky recommends that dermatologists use language neither confirming nor denying someone as a patient — instead encouraging them to contact the practice directly with questions. “You can always say, ‘If you have questions, a great place to start would be seeing a board-certified dermatologist.’ Just something straightforward, professional, and truthful. It’s too much of a legal and patient safety issue to provide any kind of advice.”

In the case of otherwise inappropriate comments on their professional social media pages — Dr. Polansky advises dermatologists to just delete them. “If there are negative comments on a photo meant to be educational, they should just be deleted,” he said. “That’s the beauty of Instagram, and something I’ve spoken about with one of our attendant dermatologists from Emory who works overseas and posts some very interesting cases. People may react badly or be afraid, and you just have to remove those comments because it creates a bad environment overall.”

● Provide employees with pre-approved social content.

Staying on the right side of HIPAA doesn’t have to involve a total social media lockdown for dermatologists and their staff. Provide employees with pre-approved content about practice events or initiatives to allow staff to advocate for their workplace with their personal and professional networks without fear of compliance violations.

STEP 3: KEEPING IT (PUBLISHING QUALITY CONTENT)

You’ve established your goals, set up proper HIPAA-compliant posting protocol, but still have few followers and poor engagement. What are you doing wrong? While the art of social media influence has become its own billion-dollar industry on Instagram alone, according to influencer marketing firm Mediakix, dermatologists can improve their social media performance with a few essential tips (no Coachella appearance needed).

High-quality images.

No one likes a blurry photo. Keep images and graphics high-resolution, with natural lighting when possible, avoiding over-exposed or shadowed images. “Our aestheticians contribute quite a bit by photographing and filming procedures, as well as coordinating ‘before and after’ photos,” said Dr. Kalimullah. “We also work with a professional photographer, particularly to help create content for our Instagram page.”

Posting schedule.

Social media isn’t always about what you post, it’s also about when you post it. Working off a formal editorial calendar can help you map out content strategically and striking the right frequency of posts can also be important. “One issue is posting too frequently, which can turn followers off; or posting too infrequently or inconsistently, which decreases your overall amount of engagement when you do post,” said Tokarz, who recommends the following posting best practices:

Don’t spam your followers.

The quickest way to irritate your followers is by inundating them with constant promotions, discounts, or “buy now” messaging. Dr. Polansky recommends that dermatologists follow the “90/10” rule — a mix of content that’s 90% meaningful health information, and 10% promotional to the practice. “Try to make the majority of your content useful to the patient, like talking about sunscreen, preventative skin checks, or various conditions that may be of interest to your patient base,” said Dr. Polansky. “Patients are consumers just like everybody else and they need to be able to get some useful information instead of following another account that’s just advertising for products.”

Avoid misleading content.

While it may be tempting to lean into all of social media’s bells and whistles to promote your services, it’s important to ensure that treatment results and procedures are being portrayed accurately. “I often see physicians who will post videos of procedures that are edited to look like they only take a few minutes to complete,” said Tokarz. “This sends out the wrong message to patients, who then get upset about the perceived high price of something that only takes a few minutes to do. It also perpetuates the assumption that anyone can perform these procedures, which leads to people attempting to do their own botulinum toxin or lip injections.”

Follow smart.

While following can be subjective, in general it’s best to follow people you know either directly or peripherally, as they are more likely to follow you back. This can include local businesses and entities, vendors you work with, fellow physicians, or professional organizations and institutions. However, one important rule of thumb: Do not follow patients. “They can follow you and your pages, but following them back is crossing a professional boundary,” said Tokarz.

Concise captioning.

Keep post captions pithy. Think in phrases or short strings of impactful words, rather than run-on sentences.

Tag correctly.

Use the right hashtags — both popular ones (like #dermatologist) and some ownable ones for your brand. Avoid hashtagging #every #word #you #can #think #of — this will turn off followers and yield little exposure.

Use these essentials to get started with social media — or take your online presence to the next level