A continuing series on physician online reputation. Created in partnership with The Doctors Company as part of their social media resources for physicians.
Physicians can brand themselves on social media platforms by using what I call a hub and spoke strategy. Physicians should have a central hub. It could be a blog or their practice’s website. This is where they can create their content. It’s important that they own this hub and not have it hosted on a third party platform, like Facebook for instance. If that third party platform wants to inject advertisements or change the look of your content, there’s nothing you can do about it. Worse, if that platform goes away, so will your content.
Then you want social media outposts that spoke out from that hub. This is Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, where you can engage readers who may consume your content on those different sites.
What I do at KevinMD.com, I house my content on my blog, and that’s my social media hub. Then you could have social media outposts like I do on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where I can spark conversations with readers who consume my content on that site. It’s important to keep your branding consistent across platforms using the same slogan, logo, and headshot. It’s a great way to expand your digital footprint with a consistent brand.
Kevin Pho is an internal medicine physician and co-author of Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices. He is on the editorial board of contributors, USA Today, and is founder and editor, KevinMD.com, also on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
