Does a Physician’s Social Media Impact Belong on their CV?

Social media now plays a growing role in scholarship, education, information dissemination, and career advancement for physicians. It doesn’t take the place of traditional journals, it performs a different job and meets different needs.

Those physicians who have recognized the emerging role of social media have become influencers in their professions and in the conversations around their medical specialty or disease area – to the benefit of all of us.

The question is, as more and more time is spent by HCPs publishing social media content, and its increasing importance, how should that be reflected in the traditional CV? The job of a CV is to reflect the professional output of an individual as well as an attempt to reflect who that person is. Without listing professional social media output, the CV will have a gap and a growing area of a physician’s professional practice will be missing – to the detriment of the candidates and those hiring.

This landed in my email, and I am linking it here to highlight another instance of highly deceptive marketing. Social media follows really doesn’t make anyone an “influencer” or a thought leader. In fact, I am well aware of an esteemed cancer researcher and a scientist who’s practically found everywhere. Either he’s got superpowers with bountiful time or has a massive team of hired marketing consultants that does his placement and possibly ghostwrites for him. These are high stakes where visibility is equivalent to being able to influence the discourse.

The answer to the question is a qualified no. It is because if the physician is spending time on social media amassing “followers”, when does the physician actually see patients?

The best way to grow followers on social media is to post in good quality content, be aware of the nuances and identify your niche. The followers grow “organically” as a method of discovery. Either way, these services have a considerable percentage of automated accounts that artificially inflates the user counts. It is impossible to know the real from the fake profiles. I don’t care about Twitter/Facebook followers and remains one of the most useless artificial metrics. Symplur has a business model to follow, but they would be better off without such deceptive tactics.

via Does a Physician’s Social Media Impact Belong on their CV?