Social Media Marketing for Plastic Surgeons
Plastic surgeons are trying to use social media to attract new patients to their practices.
In this post, we’ll describe top strategies for social media marketing for plastic surgeons. We’ll also cover the following:
- How Much are Plastic Surgeons Posting on Social Media?
- What are the Best Plastic Surgery Posts to Gain Engagement (with examples)?
- Whose Posts on Plastic Surgery Get the Most Engagement?
- 7 Steps to Build Social Media Marketing Into Your Medical Practice
Top reality stars like Dr. Miami and Dr. Pimple Popper are in the lead but many other plastic surgeons feel like they are struggling to gain traction on social media.
These are the results of a study done by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the Center for Internet Research at the University of Haifa in Israel, published in 2018.
How Much are Plastic Surgeons Posting on Social Media?
Physicians posting on social media are in the minority – only 6% of Twitter posts about plastic surgery were posted by plastic surgeons.
The rest of the social media posts are coming from current customers and prospective customers, Google and Yelp Reviews, Facebook Reviews and comments on YouTube and Instagram.
On Facebook and YouTube, posts about plastic surgery were similarly posted primarily by people and companies other than plastic surgeons:
- On Facebook, only 18% of posts were written by plastic surgeons.
- On YouTube, only 13% of posts were posted by plastic surgeons.
- Only on Instagram did plastic surgeons post the majority of the 300 studied posts – 65% of Instagram posts were made by plastic surgeons.
What are the Best Plastic Surgery Posts to Gain Engagement (with examples!)
Here are 5 of the top 6 ‘main attractions’ for a plastic surgeons’ social media posts, according to the Haifa study:
- Jokes – Dr. Miami pulls this off but most plastic surgeons struggle to be funny online. Too bad, because this is the #1 means of engaging followers.
- Attractive Female Plastic Surgeon (here is an example of Dr. Pimple Popper).
Sorry guys, ‘Attractive Male Plastic Surgeon’ was a bit further down the list at #12. - Celebrities (here is an example of Dr. Miami with the rapper Kodak Black)
- Personal Story (here is an example of Dr. Pimple Popper sharing her personal story of doubt and anxiety when she 1st started posting surgical videos on YouTube in 2016)
- Provocative Surgery (here are some provocative surgical videos from Dr. Scottsdale, aka: Dr. Carlos Mata).
Whose Posts on Plastic Surgery Get the Most Engagement?
Where and Who initiates the post impacts how much engagement the post gets – Celebrity influencers garner many more Likes, Shares and Comments than do posts by the doctors, patients, private people or the doctors’ own medical practice. The study authors called this feature of the post the ‘Social Media Currency’.
Posts with video (not just surgical video, which was a separate tracked category in this study) were among the posts with the highest engagement in this study – on average, over 700 shares per post.
Pro Tip: Make videos, especially surgical videos, which your prospective patients LOVE!
Want to go viral? Discover the factors that make modern videos go VIRAL!
We describe why surgical videos are really ‘Social Proof’ – social proof helps people do hard things – things like overcome fear of surgery, take action to improve their lives and make a positive change.
7 Steps to Build Social Media Marketing Into Your Medical Practice
We have derived these 7 simple Rules of Social Media by analyzing successful online influencers like the following:
- Dr. Miami
- Dr. Pimple Popper
- Dr. Scottsdale
- Dr. Mike
- Kevin MD
We’ve only addressed the plastic surgeons in this blogpost but there are plenty of other physician specialties that are killing it on social media right now.
Take a look at this review of Dr. Miami’s social media program – we used the 7 Rules of Social Media in 2021 to categorize and simplify Dr. Miami’s efforts. He scored a perfect 100%!
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