Social Media Use Among Academic Hand Surgeons

Abstract

PURPOSE: Social media has revolutionized communication in society and has become an important interface between patients, trainees, and physicians for education, networking, and marketing. A growing number of surgeons are embracing this trend by increasing their social media presence. Many studies have investigated the benefits of a surgeon’s web presence in plastic and aesthetic surgery, but a paucity of data exists in use among academic hand surgeons. The objective of this study was to evaluate social media use in fellowship trained, academic hand surgeons and to investigate differences between orthopaedic and plastic surgery trained hand surgeons. METHODS: Hand surgery fellowship programs were identified from the ASSH website, and a list of faculty members from each respective program was compiled. A search was performed for faculty members on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and personal websites. The respective accounts and/or personal websites were investigated for any content related to hand surgery; accounts with personal content only were not included. Faculty members were analyzed by sex, board certification status, subspecialty of residency training (plastic surgery versus orthopaedic surgery), years in practice, geographical region (east, west, south, or midwest), and professional presence on a personal website or accessible social media platform. Analysis of variance and student t tests were performed to evaluate the statistical significance (P = 0.05) of differences between groups. RESULTS: A total of 469 academic hand surgeons were included. Among academic hand surgeons in the United States, LinkedIn is the most common platform utilized at 40.3%, followed by Facebook (15.78%), a personal website (13.86%), Twitter (12.37%), and Instagram (4.05%). Plastic hand surgeons are more present on Instagram (8.26% versus 2.59%) and Twitter (19.01% versus 10.06%) (P = 0.0062837 and P = 0.009921, respectively). Male hand surgeons were more likely than female hand surgeons to use LinkedIn (41.19% versus 34.85%) (P = 0.044956). Southern (18.89%) and eastern region (14.36%) surgeons utilized personal websites more than western (6.52%) and midwestern (4.60%) surgeons (P = 0.0319107). CONCLUSION: Despite the widely known use of social media amongst plastic and aesthetic surgeons, this study shows the use of web-based marketing strategies to be quite rare in the academic hand surgery setting. Social media can have a profound impact on medical practices and thus we suggest that academic plastic and orthopaedic hand surgeons throughout the United States should consider having a larger social media presence to expand advertising, improve patient education, and enhance networking within their practices.