Leveraging Social Media Analytics for Physicians.

Abstract

To the Editor: We read with great interest the article by Perez and colleagues 1 on developing a physician-led social media training program to address the need for formal instruction on social media use. In addition to the educational objectives proposed by the authors, we recommend incorporating training on basic principles of social media analytics into their toolkit and future Social Media Summit. By using YouTube analytics features, medical professionals can measure parameters, such as number of views, age and gender of viewers, watch time, average view duration, and number of likes/comments/subscribes on their own YouTube medical education videos and channels. Drawing from our own experiences exploring the role of YouTube in disseminating medical education to the general public, we demonstrated that YouTube analytics was a useful tool in understanding our audience, as well as their interests. 2–4 For example, YouTube analytics revealed the general public was viewing our geriatric-themed educational videos using mobile devices, and they were sharing the videos using WhatsApp. 4 We have subsequently incorporated such insights into optimizing our medical education media content for the general public. There are both benefits and risks associated with social media use. Nevertheless, for physicians who are committed to public health and patient education through social media, leveraging analytics could further improve the quality of health education and promotion. Acknowledgments: The authors wish to thank Jamie O.P. Chung for her review of this letter.