The Independent Physician Entrepreneur in social media

There are numerous aspects to consider when we think about a Physician as an Entrepreneur.  This includes expanding the role of physicians beyond the clinical practice. The Physician inventor, the independent physician consultant, the physician in research consulting and let’s not forget, the physician in a medical practice, are all examples of the independent physician entrepreneur.

Most Physicians often start out as an independent entrepreneur  – an independent business owner. Their business, quite simply – their practice.  Whether a physician owns their own practice or whether they work in partnership with other physicians, the physician entrepreneur must build their business (their practice) – their company.  Physician entrepreneurs have the ultimate responsibility for the success of their practice and additionally, for their patients. Like any other entrepreneurial spirited business owner, the physician’s practice is their business and with that comes the responsibilities of building the company business and their Company Brand.

Building a company brand for medical and healthcare websites in our technologically advanced era takes time, effort and careful planning but can also be a lot of fun.  In the medical and healthcare industry, there are critical elements to consider when building a physician or other healthcare provider’s brand.  Social Media is a great place to start! Outlining your social media presence and social networking for those in the medical and healthcare industry as part of your business plan can actually be helpful. Identifying your vision for your brand (or the overall impression) is a critical first step in branding.  You need to be very careful when choosing to outsource your branding, while you also need to heed caution doing this yourself.

We have put together a shortlist of policies from various healthcare facilities to provide you additional insight, during your initial learning process and can also be utilized as an ongoing resource tool: Social Media Policy for Healthcare Providers.

There are many areas in social media networking where you can start building your brand. Certainly you can do this independently or MedCepts team members and niche network members can assist you, whether you are seeking initial set up, full time management or simply part time marketing assistance – perhaps a little “twist” from an outsider’s viewpoint.  If you simply would like to promote for followers, likes, or other platform specific needs – remember you are part of an entire network, at MedCepts!

Here are a few areas you might consider relative to implementing to help you in building your brand:

  • Facebook page – Medical Practice specific. Facebook is not only for physician practices but additionally for hospitals and ancillary healthcare providers. If you think Facebook is for the younger generation, it’s time to take a look again. We are compiling a List of Healthcare Providers on Facebook for you to explore or you can simply go to Facebook and conduct a search. e.g “Hospital” We have several Facebook pages – Here’s one with 20,000+ “Likes” Facebook/MedCepts
  • Twitter accounts – Twitter accounts can be powerful whether MD specific, practice specific or both. Get out there and obtain followers, give practice updates,  just tweet and obtain retweets! Build your brand – all in 140 characters or less! We have multiple accounts on Twitter, but here is one with 150,000+ followers for you to explore. MedCepts
  • YouTube channel – This is a great way to provide an introduction to your practice. Here you can consider utilizing specific clips about treatments, life style changes, or target disease states in your specialty. Be sure to also focus on building likes, views and subscribers. (Subscribers want to know about your next video upload!) Feel free to explore one of our channels we have for MedCepts on YouTube:
  • About Page on YouTube provides total number of subscribers (Nearly 3,000) and total number of video views: 13,500+
  • Website Creation – if your practice or consulting business does not have it’s own domain, then it really is time to get one! You may need one for your healthcare practice AND your entrepreneurial business. Since we recognize the need for websites (or multiple websites), we have put together all sorts of “freebies” in website hosting packages we offer through one of our other community websites. www.hostprn.com  If you need reliable web designing partners, we have many network members with amazing portfolios. Once you have your domain and a few tabs on your website, it will be important to provide quality and relevant Content for Medical and Healthcare Websites.
  •  Press releases are another great way to educate about new treatments, services and procedures you provide, or utilize for exposure about your participation in the community, etc.
  • Blog posts – Blogs can be an extremely beneficial part to building your brand, whether you add a section on your own website or join in on other blogs. Blogs are fairly easy to add to any website – adding a “Feed” for your blog is also beneficial. A blog feed will send new postings to those that follow your feed AND search engines love them! We have several blogs –
  •  Health content is a great way to add value to your practice, whether you offer it in your office or on your website. We have numerous suppliers that can provide you health content and many of our independent clinician consultants can assist you. You can also license health content or simply “Feed” some into your website. (Typically, feeds are branded by the content provider, which means you are helping them to brand their company through additional exposure to your website visitors.)