Every spine and joint surgeon needs a personal brand: How to define your audience and authentic self for social media.

Personal branding is not just about patient recruitment; it is also about building a formidable reputation and a personal brand that patients trust and recognize. This is especially true for musculoskeletal surgeons, who are in a highly competitive and constantly evolving field.?

Today's exercise is preparing a post for social media. In your personal life you can afford to be lackadaisical; not here. Today you need to take deliverate steps to use social media to establish your personal brand. In order to find your audience you will need to know what they look like and where they hang out. Begin with demographics.

Patient demographics??

Once thing disease and social channels have in common is that they share similar demographics. The magic of digital media is that it allows you to target populations for your message by age, gender, income, location, and education levels. Define these demographic values for your practice by consider the following:??

Age. Mostly (but not always) determined by subspecialty and practice business model. Joint replacement is 45 ---> over 65. But this can vary by practice: if you want to avoid Medicare joints, then target 45 – 65-year-olds.??

Gender. The least important demographic variable. While there is a higher incidence of some procedures by general (hips, shoulders), it is not enough to build a marketing campaign around.??

Income. If you are in network and accept Medicare this is not an issue. If you are targeting people with out of network benefits who will travel for surgery, you want to show your content to rich people. Similarly, if for whatever reason you feel your practice has too many Medicaid patients then you want to target people who make too much to qualify.??

Location. Social channels allow you to geotarget. There more to this than drawing a 20 mile radius around your clinic. Use your billing software to look at where your patients are coming from. It may not be just the area around your practice location. I was surprised several years into my practice to find out 1/3 of my patients were coming from rural Arizona towns that did not have a Neurosurgeon. These days you can geotarget those hotspots.??

Education. Generally, not too helpful as spine and joint conditions affect everyone regardless of educational achievement.

Interests. The social channels do not allow you to search for people by disease. As a result, defining interests is not generally not super helpful. One caveat is large employers. I was able to target a semi-conductor plan near my clinic by listing an interest in the manufacturing company. (They also had a killer commercial coverage plan for their employees.)

Now that you have your demographics down, it's time to find your value proposition.

Write out your value proposition?

In medicine the value proposition is your strengths and expertise that lead to the benefits patients can expect from selecting you as their surgeon. You must have a healthy ego to be a surgeon, but the important thing here is to put that aside and look at yourself from the patient’s point of view. Your training and experience are important only as far as what you can you do for them. They are the customers.?

Write a sentence that defines your personal value proposition for patients. Here are some examples:??

Sports Medicine. “As a fellowship-trained, board-certified orthopedic surgeon credentialed sports medicine with X years of experience, I provide arthroscopic surgeries of the knee and shoulder that help athletes get back to their game as quickly and safely as possible.”?

Adult reconstruction. “As a board-certified orthopedic surgeon who specializes in joint replacement and does over XXX hips and YYY knees a year, I have embraced tools like a robotic assistant and minimally invasive approaches so that I can offer you a new joint with a safer, outpatient experience.”?

Spine. “I am a board-certified neurosurgeon, which includes brain surgery, but my passion is using minimally invasive approaches to the spine that get you better faster and with less pain.”?

Once you have your value propositon in words, it's time to select the right channel.

Channel selection

In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for building a personal brand. This means having a professional website that highlights your value proposition. Most doctor's website looks like they were made for a first grader, “All about me.” Your website must be about what YOU can do for your PATIENTS; it is all about them. As such, you need a simple page that tells patients who you are, what types of people should come to your practice, why they should pick you, and how to reach you.?

As an exercise google your own name now. Who comes up first? If it is not you or a site, you control then you have a reputation problem. My goal for the doctors and facilities I market is to have control of every site that comes up on the first page of a google search for their name. Control your rank to control your reputation. Check out this page for Dr. Dan Galat, a doctor for whom I do the marketing as part of his surgery center.??

In addition to your website, you need to be active on social media platforms ---Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook--- where you can share your knowledge and engage with your audience. Each channel has a cadence, format, demographic, and miscellaneous features that can make it right or wrong for you.??

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Not all channels have worked well for surgeons due to issues like insanely high cadence (Twitter) or just the wrong group of users (LinkedIn). YouTube is mostly male and does not have the video editing tools of TikTok. Instagram is great for people who are not afraid to make videos. Facebook and TikTok are the right answer for most surgeons who want to slide bye; if you are into it think about Instagram.?

One final thing (I promise) before you get to get to have fun?

OK. You have your demographics, value proposition, and channel picked out. There is one last thing that you need to be able to generate awesome content.??

I got this last thing from someone who is as good at social media marketing as you are at surgery. That person is the ‘momager’ Kris Jenner. In her masterclass Mrs. Jenner explains that there is one key to killer content.?Your content needs to be authentic.

Finding your authentic voice for social media

Patients have a lot of choices for their surgeon, and you are not the only board-certified, nice, fellowship trained person in your zip code. What makes you the best is you.??

This is one of the main reasons I am excited about social media marketing. The large platforms have the capacity to match surgeons with the patients who would benefit most from seeing them. There are horses for courses. The kind of content you generate is going to make sure you attract the right horse.?

I remember going to theses growing up their big and celebratory. In my experience marketing surgeons, it usually comes down to the reason you became a doctor in the first place. Think about what you said in your medical school interviews. It was some variation of the competent caretaker, warrior savior, tradition, or science nerd.??

Competent caretaker. This group of smart and competent people often had a sick relative as a child or suffered an illness themselves. The desire to care for others grows from watching someone you love to suffer and knowing you could help.??

Warrior saviors. If you have a warrior mentality--- but do not like the idea of killing others--- then fighting disease to care of people makes sense.?

Tradition. Have you ever been to a doctor whose dad and/or Mom were also a doctor? Yes. You have. You may even know people whose ancestry is more of a doctor bush than a tree.??

Science nerds. Medicine is a high paying and prestigious job for people who love science and get satisfaction out of the intellectual pursuit of helping others. End of story.??

And of course, the most common reason for becoming a doctor: combinations of the above.??

To make your social campaigns authentic, your true purpose should be the theme of your content. For example, if you are a Warrior Savior then post a video a patient sent from their phone thanking you for fighting for them.??

You do not have to be on all the channels but leverage your content by repurposing it. Post the video your patient made on your website. Then use the tic toc editor to post a video of you reacting to the patient video on TikTok. Then put a handwritten thank you on Facebook with a link to the video on TikTok and Instagram. Then boost the note on Facebook to get thousands of views. You get the idea.?

Create content??

Finally! Geesh.??

Creating valuable content is another key component of building a strong personal brand. This means sharing your knowledge and expertise through blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other types of content. By providing valuable information to your audience, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and build trust with potential patients.?

When creating content, be sure to keep your target audience and demographics in mind. What are your future patients’ pain points? What questions do they have? What information do they need to make informed decisions about their health? By addressing these issues in your content, you can provide real value to your audience and build a loyal following.?

Here are some specific content ideas you can feel free to create:?

• Patient testimonials are a powerful tool for building trust and credibility. When patients share their positive experiences with your practice, it can help to build confidence in your services and encourage others to choose you as their orthopedic surgeon.?

Whenever someone tells you how happy they are and how much they recommend you, ask them to recommend you while their phone is recording. Be sure to collect patient testimonials and feature them prominently on your website and other marketing materials. You can also share patient success stories on social media and in your content to showcase the results that you can achieve for your patients.?

• Engaging with your audience is an important part of building a personal brand. This means responding to comments and messages on social media, answering patient questions, and participating in online discussions in your field. Schedule time each day to answer questions on social media. This is like brushing your teeth – consistently is the key to good results. Also, to avoid liability and HIPAA, answer all questions in the third person.?

By engaging with your audience, you can build relationships and establish yourself as a trusted authority in your field. It also helps to humanize your brand and show that you care about your patients and their health.?

Post and boost your content?

All right, you are finally ready to post your content on the channel you have selected. If you want more eyeballs on your work, I advise boosting your post. Assign a budget of say $5 per day for six days, enter the audience demographics, geotarget, and let it rip.?

Next month we will go over how to combine your website and social posts with an email marketing campaign.??