The silence after an inaugural tweet can be ego-crushing. For medical professionals, garnering a following is a quantifiable exercise not just in personal popularity, but in the medical field itself—dermatology lags behind oncology in Twitter followers, for example. For the doctors themselves, balancing professional networking among peers with patient sensitivity and even personal tidbits makes for a very careful curation of a very public social space.
Twitter is a platform that connects experts and the general population democratically, and is a modern tool for direct interaction with leaders in medical fields. The benefits of engaging professionally in social media are great—doctors and medical specialists can get real-time updates about breaking news in their fields, and connect virtually with peers around the world. Doctors in academia have the option of promoting their research to audiences who wouldn’t normally have access to their work. Collaborations are fostered online through likes and retweets. And the economy of 280 characters also allows for brief, direct feedback to long research papers.
But the social price of self-promotion is a factor medical professionals have to consider: the stigma of self-congratulatory tweets as immodest. Several doctors at Penn Medicine shared their impression of social media, highlighting the benefits and risks of sharing professional, and sometimes personal, tweets to the community at large.
Read the full story at the Penn Medicine News blog.
