Published in the April 2015 issue of Today’s Hospitalist
WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA do hospitalists use? In our 2014 Today’s Hospitalist Compensation & Career Survey, we asked hospitalists to tell us what social media they use in their day-to-day practice. Here’s a look at the questions we asked and the responses we received.
A tool for networking
Social media sites like Facebook are a great way to keep up with friends and family, but how much do hospitalists use social media for professional purposes? According to our latest survey, half of hospitalists say they use social media to network with others in health care. But among survey respondents, popular sites like Facebook take a back seat to other sites that are geared more toward business and medicine.
Business sites
According to the 2014 Today’s Hospitalist Compensation & Career Survey, LinkedIn leads the list, with 26% of hospitalists saying they’ve used that networking site. Medical networking sites also scored big, with 21% of hospitalists saying they’ve used Doximity and 18% reporting they’ve used QuantiaMD. But the monster social media sites lag behind in our survey, with only 14% of hospitalists reporting that they use Facebook and only 5% saying they use Twitter professionally.
Social media and job-seekers
We asked hospitalists who were using social media if they had used any social media sites to find a job. Only 24% responded yes, and the most popular strategy “used by 17% of hospitalists who use social media professionally “was to search or browse job ads on a social media site. About 10% of these hospitalists said they used social media to gather information about prospective employers or to network with possible employers or people already working for them.
Finally, when asked if social media were helpful in finding a job, 83% of these hospitalists said it had been very or somewhat helpful. For the remaining 17%, however, social media had apparently not been helpful.
