Surgeon Facebook Behavior: The Shocking Data on What They Like, Where They Spend Money, and More

Data will talk to you if you're curious and willing enough to listen.

Social media algorithms are changing every few months with millions of dollars poured into one simple goal:

Keep users on the platform longer.

If you keep users on a social platform longer, you have a higher chance to show them an ad that will help a company paying for advertising to drive sales.

Do this well and then you can charge more for advertisements.

If a platform overdoes this, users become turned off and leave, or they stay but psychologically automate their attention away from those ads.

Millennials practically ignore banner ads on the right side of the screen because we grew up with Facebook and automated our attention away from this.

Is it worth it to still advertise there? Maybe, but why would you spend a penny on something you know has a higher probability of failure? Don't be a hero. Follow what the data shows you and be objective about things.

Since many passionate medical device marketers I know have boards and executive teams that don't allow them to build their Facebook pages I decided to help my peers out.

The thing about Facebook is that until you hit over 1,000 you can't get access to the high quality tools Facebook provides to analyze different audiences.

Why would you want to do that? If you do that (and you do it well) then you can begin to create marketing, products, services, and experiences that customers will love. As I have my own Facebook business page and built the likes up into the thousands I have access to these tools.

Since our industry is behind on the times and I selfishly would like to get more ideas and inspiration from peers, I decided to analyze and gather data on general surgeons.

This is about all medical device marketers coming together to help market meaningful experiences to our prospective customers.

Sure, we compete against each other but unless we do so with the best tools in the world we won't push each other and inspire new ways to market and sell.

A Quick Sidebar on Social Media

Let me be frank about social media; I love it because it's the most powerful marketing and sales tool out there.

Sure, I love keeping in touch with family and networking, but at the end of the day I spend a lot of time and have spent a significant amount of my own money running ads to understand how to better market to customers and drive revenues.

Social media helped topple dictatorships in third world countries and took companies from 0 to millions in revenue when used correctly. Plus, there's data involved and I personally enjoy objectively analyzing my work. There's no where to hide and it keeps me intellectually honest.

We have to remember that marketing's main goal is to mold a market and DRIVE REVENUE.

Branding, growth, engagement, and everything above and in between is without question important but it means nothing if all those efforts cannot drive sales and revenue.

Period. End of discussion.

Research Tactics of a Modern Marketer

Before sharing the Facebook data, I would like to share some tactics on how any marketer can use LinkedIn to gain some insight on their customers:

• Search "General Surgeon" in LinkedIn search
• Select "1st Connections"
• Select your Geography (for my connections I chose US)
• Then just select a few people you feel are relatively active on LinkedIn
• Go on to their profile and select "Activity" and then "Posts"

Why is this important to do? If you want your marketing to actually work (as in drive your audience to take some desired action) that requires a marketer to understand what their audience is not only engaged with (likes/shares) but also what is consciously communicated to their network (posts they write/articles they publish).

From there, move down the page to see groups.

This will tell you where the surgical tribe is spending time. Of course, try and join these groups to add some value to engage with others.

Take some notes, look for patterns, and be objective.

Now that you have some field notes, it's time to run an experiment.

Why You Need to Use Facebook's Power Editor

The next step is to move on to Facebook's Power Editor and go to "Audience Insights".

For clarification between Facebook's Power Editor and Facebook's Ad Manager:

Facebook Ads Manager

Ads Manager is the basic Facebook tool for creating and optimizing campaigns on this social network. Lately, it is going through significant changes and its functionality is beginning to resemble another Facebook tool – Power Editor. The majority of advertisers still uses Ads Manager as the main ad managing tool, whereas, this concerns particularly the advertisers new to the advertising on Facebook.

Power Editor

Power Editor is an advanced tool for managing ads on Facebook. Compared to Ads Manager, it possesses various advanced functions enabling to perform multiple actions simultaneously and to work with ads more effectively than with Ads Manager. Power Editor is used mostly by experienced advertisers managing advanced and more difficult campaigns****You dont need to take a course in this. There's this thing called Google/Youtube and after a solid 30 minutes of studying and 30 minutes of poking around you'll get the hang of it.

Using Power Editor to Research Surgeons

Since it is a niche group we are researching, choose "Everyone on Facebook". As you build a Facebook page with Likes in the thousands you can collect data on your page's audience to analyze.

The key to marketing is understanding how to delight and continue to engage the customers you have and not go on external campaigns acquiring new customers.

Unfortunately, many device companies spend little to no time building their Facebook due to guidance from their board or an executive team that doesn't fully understand it.

For the purpose of my LinkedIn network, general surgeons are a large segment that touch a variety of medical devices, from robotics to minimally invasive instruments.

This is where things get quite interesting. Remember, it doesn't matter what you think because data (aka the truth) is undefeated.

Marketers who argue against what the market does unfortunately lose every single time. Just because it doesn't make sense does not mean it should be written off. It just means that it takes a little more time investigating.

Curiosity is a skill that needs to be developed in every field, from scientists to marketers, if you ever want to advance in your field.

Setting Surgeon Demographics

The demographics I chose were based on what a U.S. based general surgeon, a couple years out of residency, and with some decision making power will look like.

This doesn't guarantee that the data captures only surgeons, but then again who has a graduate degree, makes over $200k, and is engaged with surgical based pages on Facebook?

It's a much better and more accurate assessment then what the medical device industry currently does to analyze surgeon behavior, which is nothing.

Geography > United States

Age > 35 - 64

Education > Graduate Degree

Now here's where some advanced tactics come into play:

Why would I choose these numbers? The reason is that any decision maker is likely going to fall within these ranges (My apologies to my classmates just graduating residency. Truth hurts but don't worry you'll get there in no time).

Next, we set "Interests".

This is where you begin to search topics that you discovered when investigating surgeons on LinkedIn.

If a topic has enough users engaged with it on LinkedIn, it will come up.

A good suggestion is to select anything that has keywords you know resonate with your audience (in this case, it's "Surgery" or anything related to general surgery).

Facebook will pull data if anyone matches ONE or more of the selected parameters.

Keep in mind this takes a drive to be curious enough to learn about your customer. More importantly, it means spending time listening (for an effective framework on how to actually "Listen" read this).

Checking our industries that matched, it looks like we did a good job of targeting:

Now, sit back and take a look at what data those settings brought back:

The DATA

Here's the demographic data that came back on who falls into the parameters we set:

Next, we see what are the top categories and top pages those users engaged with:

**Note on GomerBlog- If you don't know what a "GOMER" is, it's a colloquialism from the "House of God" that doctors in the book would call patients. It stands for "get out of my emergency room" - a patient who is frequently admitted with complicated but uninspiring and incurable conditions)

The next step is to begin checking out these pages to understand why those users engaged with it.

Why would this incredibly niche group we researched have an interest with obscure topics like George Takei or Alice TV? Who knows unless you begin spending time acting and thinking like your customers do online.

How They Engage

Aside from what surgeons like, it's also important to know "how" they engage. (Blue is our audience and gray is the rest of Facebook).

The way I interpret this is that surgeons are much more likely to engage with Ads and "like" them as well as click through. Sharing a post is not as high in both audiences because sharing makes a private action (liking) into a public one (sharing).

Surgeons have a culture full of secrecy and competition, so it's likely that their work habits spill over into their personal life online.

Now this serves to validate what anyone who has carried a bag and sold into an OR knows; surgeons are either on their phone or at a desktop.

After setting our income and net worth parameters, we get back our household income, house :

How Do Surgeons Spend Their Money?

Conclusion

Rather than launch into analysis of what this all means I would like to urge my medical device peers to share their thoughts as to how they read this data. Please leave questions or thoughts in the comments' section below.

If you're a surgeon, please enlighten us on how you read this data.

More importantly, take this data and go do some research. Figure out why surgeons engage like this online and try doing something different. Everything in this life, whether it's marketing or science, is a hypothesis worth disproving.

Those who continuously experiment, fail, and adjust will be the ones who are digitally fit enough to evolve and adapt to an ever-changing marketing landscape.

Data by itself is useless and becomes useful only if you apply it.

The floor, is yours......

Omar M. Khateeb is an unorthodox and innovative medical device marketing leader with a background in science and medicine. 

His interests reside in sales psychology, neuromarketing, and self-development practices.

Check out his virtual bookshelf here to find your next great read, and connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or SnapChat.