SA1 - Impact of Social Media on Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice

Abstract:

Background: Since the first social media platform was launched in 1997, we as a society can’t get enough. With over half of the global population having at least one social media account, we cannot ignore the impact of social media on our day to day lives. Alalwan et al in a systematic review of 144 studies, has shown that ultimately social media platforms increase the impact and prevalence of word of mouth relative to traditional tools. This potentially has big consequences in a referral based private practice setting. A 2018 Healthcare Consumer Insight survey of 1000 respondents found that 41% of patients still check online reviews even if they were referred to a doctor. More importantly, 95% of respondents found online physicians ratings and reviews to be somewhat very reliable. A shocking 70% of consumers said that online ratings and review sites had influences in their choice of doctor.

Methods: To better understand the relationship between social media and oral surgery practices as it stands now, we created a 19-question online survey aimed to understand the perception of oral surgeons on the impact of social media, the extent of utilization of social media in the oral surgery private practice setting and the outcomes of such utilization. The survey was distributed to AAMOS members who had enlisted their email address in the online directory. A total of 4, 621 emails were sent. We collected a total of 422 responses. Every state with the exception of four states (AK, MT, KS, WV) was represented.

Results: Our results show that 69% of oral surgeons have at least one social media account for business purposes. Of those, 35% of oral surgeons use their business social media account for business recognition, 25% use it for new patient recruitment, 13% use it for patient education and 7% use it for networking with colleagues. Not surprisingly, if an oral surgeon views social media as positively impacting their business the data suggests that this tends to correlate with the number of new patients the business acquires through social media avenues. Although 52% of oral surgeons do not believe that social media is important for business growth, our data suggests that roughly every one hundred social media followers results acquiring one new patient. Given the average budget reported in our survey results, the price of acquisition of a new patient is approximately $0.35. However, the data suggests that budget does not correlate with an increased number of new patients, thus supporting the idea that businesses do not need to invest money directly into social media accounts.

Discussion: Our results propose that social media can be a powerful tool for oral surgery practices to grow and connect with new patients. To our knowledge, social media has not been a topic of study within the field of oral surgery and thus our data is the first to be presented to suggest a positive relationship, between social media and oral surgery business strategy. Our preliminary data is limited by a small response rate and reporting bias, however, and further research will be needed to validate and emphasize the utility of social media in the oral and maxillofacial practice.

References:
1. Widmer RJ, Maurer MJ, Nayar VR, Aase LA, Wald JT, Kotsenas AL, Timimi FK, Harper CM, Pruthi S. Online Physician Reviews Do Not Reflect Patient Satisfaction Survey Responses. Mayo Clin Proc. 2018 Apr;93(4):453-457. doi: 10.1016/j.mayocp.2018.01.021. PMID: 29622095.
2. Alalwan, A., Rana, N., Algharabat, R. and Tarhini, A. (2016a). A Systematic Review of Extant Literature in Social Media in the Marketing Perspective.

Number of new patients in relation to number of followers


Oral surgeon response map