Medical influence: what does success look like?

Area of Science:

• Medical education
• Digital health communication
• Social media marketing

Background:

• Social media influencers effectively engage audiences with short videos.
• Medical teams can leverage social media for patient education.
• Defining success metrics for medical social media campaigns is challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the effectiveness of social media promotion for a medical podcast.
• To evaluate audience engagement and website traffic generated by social media efforts.
• To compare the impact of organic and paid social media promotion.

Main Methods:

• An educational podcast on end-of-life discussions was promoted via Instagram and TikTok.
• Podcast episodes were published over three months and promoted by Spotify.
• Website views and social media engagement metrics were compared between platforms and promotion types.

Main Results:

• Organic Spotify promotion resulted in 10,400 promotions and 486 listeners.
• Paid Instagram and TikTok promotions garnered over 50,000 video views but zero website visits or followers.
• Paid promotions on social media platforms were costly and ineffective for driving desired outcomes.

Conclusions:

• Current social media promotion strategies were insufficient for generating significant interest in the medical podcast.
• Medical teams should consider strategic paid promotions and marketing expertise for better reach.
• Greater transparency in social media algorithms is needed to define and achieve success in medical content dissemination.