Social Media Use Among Academic Hand Surgeons

Social media has become increasingly prevalent among the general population in the past decade. We examined the current prevalence of social media use among academic orthopedic-trained and plastic surgery-trained hand surgeons in the United States.

All publicly available hand surgery faculty across the nation were analyzed for their public social media usage, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and personal websites. Comparisons of social media usage between orthopedic-trained and plastic surgery-trained hand surgeons, male and female academic hand surgeons, hand surgeons from different regions of the United States (East, West, Midwest, and South), and years of experience were analyzed.

A total of 469 academic hand surgeons were included. Among academic hand surgeons in the United States, LinkedIn was the most common platform used (40.3%), followed by Facebook (15.78%), a personal website (13.86%), Twitter (12.37%), and Instagram (4.05%). Plastic surgery hand surgeons had more of a presence than orthopedic hand surgeons on Instagram (8.26% vs 2.59%, P < .01)) and Twitter (19.01% vs 10.06%, P < .01). Male hand surgeons were more likely than female hand surgeons to use LinkedIn (41.19% vs 34.85%, P = .04). Southern (18.89%) and Eastern (14.36%) surgeons used personal websites more than Western (6.52%) and Midwestern (4.60%) surgeons (P = .03).

Despite the widely known use of social media among plastic and aesthetic surgeons, this study shows the use of web-based marketing strategies to be quite rare in the academic hand surgery setting.

Our study shows that throughout the United States, academic hand surgeons use social media at low rates. We suggest that academic plastic surgery and orthopedic hand surgeons throughout the United States consider having a larger social media presence to expand advertising, improve patient education, and enhance networking among their practices. Social media can be a valuable tool and will likely only increase in popularity in the coming years.