Ophthalmology Practice and Social Media Influences: A Patients Based Cross-Sectional Study among Social Media Users

Many physicians consider social media a good tool for building their brands and attracting patients. However, limited data exist on patients' perceptions of the value of social media in ophthalmology. Therefore, our objective was to examine how social media influences patients when choosing an ophthalmologist among social media users, and people's behaviors toward ophthalmologists' social media accounts. This was a cross-sectional study including 1086 participants. Males represented 77.3% of the sample. The majority of the participants (71.3%) were aged between 25 and 54 years. Regarding social media sites frequently checked, Twitter ranked first (75.3%), followed by Snapchat (52.8%) and YouTube (48.7%). The majority (92.3%) used social media sites at all times of the day. Concerning the importance of ophthalmologists' social media sites, around 36.3% considered it either very or extremely important. As regards the important factors about an ophthalmologist's social media site from participants' perspectives, medical information written by the ophthalmologist (45.5%) and recommendations by friends (45.4%) were the most common reasons. Around 21% of females, compared to 16.8% of males, perceived the ophthalmologists' social media sites as extremely important, = 0.041. A quarter of participants aged between 18 and 24 years, compared to only 5.5% of those aged 65 and above, perceived the ophthalmologists' social media sites as extremely important, = 0.018. In conclusion, a considerable proportion of the people who used social media described ophthalmologists' social media sites as very/extremely important in their choice of an ophthalmologist.