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Traditional marketing for GPs is dead and a waste of money.

The information age has shifted the balance of power from GPs to patients. Today, patients use social media to share information about health providers at lightning speed, 24-7: 365 days a year and doctors can't stop it.

More telling is the fact that 35% of all patients who use social media say negative things about doctors, 40% of people who receive such negative information believe it and 41% say it affects the choices they make. Social media is the new frontier of reputation risk for doctors.

Some facts

According to a number of recent surveys, 84% of US health providers have Facebook pages, 64% have Twitter accounts, 46% post videos on YouTube, a significant percentage have profiles on LinkedIn and 12% blog. These data are indicative of what's happening in the UK. However, because doctors increasingly participate in social media doesn't mean that they are using it optimally.

Few doctors understand how social technologies interact with patients. Few use social media to reduce negative patient conversations, increase referrals, expand their services, enhance their reputations, drive loyalty and increase revenues. There are at least three reasons for this:

• Although patients increasingly engage in social media conversations, doctors don't know how to influence these
• Doctors tend to define social media technically and fail to leverage the behavioural aspects of the medium, which facilitate faster, cheaper, easier and larger scale social interactions than before
• There is no single measure of social media's financial impact, and therefore doctors find it difficult to justify allocating resources to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.

Reputations defined by patients

Thirty three percent of all patients use social media to seek medical information, track symptoms and broadcast opinions about doctors, drugs and treatments. Age is a factor: 50% of seniors; 45% of 45 to 65 year olds and 90% of 18 to 24 year olds use social technologies to do these things. Ninety percent of everyone who uses social media trusts the health information they receive.

Although it's difficult to quantify the impact that social media has on health providers, we know that patients use social technologies throughout their entire therapeutic journeys to form opinions and help them make critical choices.

Being visible is being credible

Increasingly, patients are using social networks to obtain answers to healthcare questions and to research disease states. If a health provider has a poor internet presence, patients will question their services and expertise. A weak website with poor information will trigger huge numbers of negative conversations that tarnish reputations.

Being visible is made difficult by the size and structure of the online health market. There are over two billion websites dedicated to health in an unregulated and fragmented global marketplace. This, not only makes it difficult for health providers to gain visibility, but it frustrates and confuses patients seeking health information, which impacts on the doctor-patient relationship.

Video has become the preferred format of consumers to receive health information. Also internet browsers put a high premium on video content, so websites that use video appear higher in search hierarchies and are more appreciated by patients.

Provide what patients' want

Seventy percent of patients who search online for health information want specific answers to FAQs about disease states: symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, side effects and aftercare. Patients want access to health information at speed from anywhere, any time and anyhow. Smartphones are fast becoming the gateway to health information.

Patients prefer health information in video format because it delivers a human-touch that digitalized written words don't.

Elevate the role of patient insights

Generating rich patient insights is challenging, but important. Doctors can use social media to "listen" to patients across a few, but significant touch points of their therapeutic journeys and respond quickly to signs of changing patient needs. And this can be achieved at much less cost than what traditional communications would cost.

The power and utility of social technologies hinges on participation of both health providers and patients, which suggests flatter and more responsive organisations. Creating these is challenging. And less hierarchical and more responsive organisations should not mean diminished accountability.

Boost productivity

The behavioural aspects of social media provide doctors opportunities to organise healthcare differently. For instance, using social technologies internally to communicate with colleagues transforms messages into content, which increases the efficiency of searching and results in faster and more effective collaboration.

Doctors can employ social technologies to create data and information collaboratively, which is more accurate and valuable than that collected by more traditional methods.

Takeaway

Using social media to create, develop and manage online communities of patients, payers, specialists etc can yield significant benefits for GP practices. Over time, such communities can be used to enhance patient care, respond to patients' changing needs, amplify and broadcast new services and expertise and encourage changes in the behaviour and mindsets of patients and other stakeholders.