Well, welcome, everyone. I'm excited to be here tonight. For those of you who were with us at the annual assembly, when we got together, we talked about a lot of different topics. But part of our conversation was about what we wanted to learn more about or what offerings would be useful or helpful. And social media came up a number of times. And so it was our goal to provide some sort of content on social media. And then the May, remember, May month came about. And so it was a great opportunity to actually put our conversation into action and to actually get going with and keep our group moving forward so that we have a chance to get together. So we really appreciate all of you guys being here. Also really appreciate Dr. Niehaus agreeing to speak tonight. I think I will turn it over shortly to him so he can introduce himself and get going. I think if anyone has questions, he is happy to be interrupted. But if you also would like to write in the chat box, I will be monitoring that and interjecting as I can or as appropriate. So I think without further ado, I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Niehaus. All right, everybody. My name is Bill Niehaus. I'm one of the rehab doctors out here in Colorado. Today, I was thinking about this topic and having presented it a few different ways. I thought it would be helpful to just kind of share what I do and my approach and make sure that there's time for questions and things as we go through this. So please drop in things as we go. The microphone sounds a little funky, so I don't know if it got adjusted. Is everyone else hearing the kind of vibration? Can you hear me okay? Sounding a little scratchy. Sounds like a little vibrating. What if I do that? Is that better? No. No. No. All right. Let's try this. Any better? Yes. Yeah. A lot better. Okay, we'll stick with that microphone then. Okay. So here's my general process with social media and kind of how I approach it and what it looks like. I'd love to get your thoughts as we go through, so feel free to jump in. We have some interactive portions kind of built into this, so we'll kind of see what happens. And my disclosures. I was the Pima Nord Journal social media editor for about nine years and have recently transitioned to be the ACRM host of the RehabCast podcast starting last year. I mainly use Twitter for my professional life. Instagram is really for family and personal life. I'm on Facebook for some random things like community swap pages and stuff, but I really rarely use Facebook or LinkedIn. And then I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on Snapchat. I don't have any financial disclosures to share. Since this is the introvert community, I do have some quotes in here about kind of being a little bit quieter or shy and that kind of helped break up these sections. But to start off, if you have your phones handy, pull up that QR code and kind of let us know what your thoughts are on social media. And we'll be able to see those results when I switch my sharing screen. We'll kind of see these live as they drop in. And this is kind of just to get my sense of who is in the audience and kind of what they're thinking about already with their social media situation. It would not be an online presentation if someone didn't lose their connection, even though you're at the university. Anyway, in terms of social media, kind of rehashing where I think I left off, it's really just another form of communication. So when you think about different types, just externalizing it, there are kind of two-way closed looped form of communication where I tell Dr. Baraki something, it's just between the two of us. Also that fits in that two-way closed loop email text. It's really just between two individuals. When you think about mostly one-way communication, it's more like radio, TV. Someone built something, put it out there, and it's going out into the world, and people are viewing it, but there's not a great way to kind of talk back at that person that's presenting that type of media. And then there's open loop communication, which really is what social media is more. So I may post something on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, but then people can see what I have posted, and they can interact with it, and they can do different things with it, and they can kind of see that communication between myself and Dr. Baraki, or between myself and a given journal or another member in the PM&R community. And everyone can see that and then react with it. You could like that thing. You could continue that message. You could comment on it and do all sorts of things off of it, but it's much more open and information can spread far faster than traditional kind of two-way closed loop types of communication. So one of the publications I've done with Dr. Julie Silver, this is kind of what you think about an ideal situation would be. You have a social media environment where physicians are interacting with medical societies and journals and other physicians to try to drive that open form of communication about various topics. There may be a post on shoulder muscular skeletal medicine that then gets put out in the journal, that then physicians comment on, that then gets brought in to a bigger conversation at a conference, and the medical society at large engages with that. This is kind of an ideal state of what working on social media could look like, potentially. When we now think about this in a different light, it's kind of everyone shines given the right light, so it's okay to be a little bit introverted or more extroverted online, regardless of where you're at, it's just kind of another way to share information. So I'm going to go through next kind of what my social media engagement looks like from a professional sense. So really the secret of this is kind of putting yourself in the right lighting so that it makes sense for you in that domain. This is my Twitter page. It's got a picture of professional me, it's got a picture of our medical campus, it kind of has some different stats about me, but really what really is nice is it also gives me a chance to kind of give a quick bio on here. This is my bio. I'm an assistant professor of PM&R at CU PhysMed, I work as the rehab host, these are the different things I'm involved with, and we'll talk about hashtags here in a second, and gives a little bit more information about who I am and what I look like online. Basically this is a demonstration of when you create that social media profile, who you are, what is your brand, who are you affiliated with, what diagnosis do you care for, it's a professional page, where are you located in the city or in the world, and then kind of links to CV or your hospital home page or ways to find you in the greater scheme of things. On that bio you saw a lot of things that we call hashtags, and really what hashtags are is a way to flag a conversation containing a certain amount of data, or this type of topic involves this, it's like putting a tab on something. I was part of the launch through the PM&R journal to start using the hashtag physiatry. When I looked back from April 1st, 2023 to April 26th, 2023, there were a little bit over 2,000 tweets with hashtag physiatry. There were about 4.4 million people that saw a tweet with hashtag physiatry in it. There was about four tweets per hour, and a little bit over 700 participants that were using it themselves. So that number looks a little bit funny because people might have posted it and then others might have echoed it. Hashtags are a great way to help other people find the information that you're putting out there. Great way to flag that conversation about medical education, spinal cord injury, shoulder MSK, lots of different ways to flag it, and what it does is it helps others kind of filter that information that's out there into their feed to know what people are talking about in an area of interest. So really, it's a way to filter things. You can use this link, which is a whole big article online about ways to filter your feed of information that's flowing to you on Twitter. So you can definitely click this link now and get that link and kind of take a picture of it, or it'll be available online as well. I'm going to kind of show you how I use it, the hashtags and different search functions within Twitter to kind of help me filter that information. Because in general, people kind of end up falling into a few different bigger domains in their involvement in social media. So there's some people that just use this as a way to get information. They're, you know, seeing what's happening out there on that social media platform. There are other people that see information that's been posted and then spread that message to others. They retweet it. They like it. They engage with it in some form or fashion, but they're not generating their own content to put out there in the sphere of that domain. There's other people that are actually creating content to put on that platform for others to find and to generate. And we're all using this differently, and this is a way to kind of help set up your stream. Because after you've liked a certain number of people, when you log on to your homepage, it just looks like this running tally of information that's overwhelming and you don't know what to deal with. And there's just too much there. So there's a way to filter it. And here's what I use, given most of my online presence with social media is Twitter. This is the thing called TweetDeck that helps me filter all this in different ways. And basically on Twitter, there's ways to make lists on a given hashtag. There's ways to make lists of people that you're following. There's ways to make certain search criteria come up so that if in this group of people, there's a given post that has a certain amount of engagement or activity online, you can see it there. So I'm going to share what my page looks like for this. Hey, Bill, can I interrupt? Sorry. It looks like we are seeing your notes on the slideshow. I don't know if you care. But I don't know if you wanted to start the slideshow versus just keeping it as it is. Totally up to you. That fixes that. But then I'm about to share this other screen. There's nothing hidden in my notes. It's just kind of sourcing. Yeah, exactly. I figured it was just fine, but I thought I'd let you know. So hopefully, you guys can see my tweet deck. And what tweet deck does is that there are different filters that I can look at things with. And I'm going to be looking to a separate screen. So sorry, I'm not looking at the camera right now. So in this first column on the left, I have all the journals I follow. And basically, what this search criteria is, I'll show you. So this is a particular list of all the journals I'm interested in. And they need to have a minimum of five replies, or 15 retreats, or 40 favorites. And so these are kind of the high yield things that the journals have put out. And it's even further filtered to what are people interacting with the most. And I can kind of scroll through this feed and see what have been the things that have looked busy ever from these journals, and kind of seeing what people have put out there for that. On this next one, it's the same list, but I filtered in a different way. So it's all the journals I follow and kind of see what they're putting out there. But instead, when you look at my filter for this one, it's in the last day. So it's that same kind of thing. But what are the top tweets over the last 24 hours from those journals that I follow? So I can quickly scroll through this. Look at that. There's this talk that's happening right now. That's kind of crossed the threshold as being a high engagement tweet that AAPMNR News put out. And there's a post from the PTJ and all these different things that I can quickly scroll through and see what have the different societies and journals that I really want to pay attention to out there, what have been the top engagement things out there. And then you can see this next third column is of all the tweets on Twitter that have used hashtag physiatry, which one have a minimum of, I think it's 20 favorites or 10 retweets. And so you can see these have been the things that have been put out there in the last day or so that have had a lot of engagement. And as I'm looking through it, I can be like, let's see. So I tend to like the ones where they're saying, hey, I'm a new to med Twitter. I'm interested in what's going on. And then, oh, he was on the back of the physiatry thing. So I'm going to like that one. I'm engaging with those things. And I can set up all these different filters to kind of see what's going on. I'm the host of the RehabCast. So I want to see all the tweets that have used RehabCast. I can see all of the physiatry tweets that don't include hiring or aren't retweets. And I can engage with all. You can think of filtering this all sorts of different ways. And you'll notice, unlike the Twitter homepage, there's no ads here. You're not confronted with all these annoying other things that are happening that they tend to want your eyeballs in front of. It's just the information that you want. And you can really go down this rabbit hole if you want, or you can make it streamlined for just the things that you're interested in. Hopefully, that's a good demonstration to kind of see how I look at stuff. I tend to look at Twitter maybe about 10 minutes each day, and I'm able to go through all those different feeds to see what's going on. And that's kind of my next thing, is really trying to see, like, you can really get sucked into social media. You can really get hooked on trying to get the thing out there that people like. You can really get stuck on trying to find those things, and it can become a little bit addictive, absolutely. But if you set limits on your phone, if you set limits on that webpage, if you set up a timer and you say, in 10 minutes, I'm going to turn off this webpage, it really helps narrow it down. It helps you focus on the areas that you're interested in. Get the information that you need without feeling like you're getting sucked into that doom scrolling situation where you're just flipping through trying to find all the information and get lost in it, and suddenly, it's 45 minutes later, and now you have to still finish your notes. This is kind of a good spot to potentially stop and ask for questions. Up next, I'm going to be talking about pitfalls and other things that can happen. So if there's things that come up between what we've talked about so far, it might be a good spot to check in. I can see the chat. Okay, no worries. pitfalls to avoid. So this is kind of the area that makes most people nervous when they're thinking about joining social media. Is this part of Twitter or a different path? The tweet deck is a company that used to exist separate from Twitter, Twitter bought it, and now it's a Twitter product, and it's completely free. So you don't have to pay anything for it, at least with the way things stand right now, who knows, but it's a huge resource. I used to use a program called Hootsuite, but every year they upped their pricing and they got rid of their free account completely, to my knowledge. And so I don't really recommend that one anymore. There's also one called Buffer that is kind of similar, but I find tweet deck is the nicest since it's baked into Twitter already. Rachel, you had a question? Yeah, I was just curious if your general approach for social media, do you ever engage with patients through social media, or is it exclusively with other professionals and with journals and things like that? I was just kind of curious what your thoughts were on that. This kind of falls into that pitfall category a little bit. Me personally, I have not had the attempt of a patient to interact with me on social media, nor have I seen someone on social media that is a patient that I've decided to interact with, so it hasn't come up as a problem for me. It theoretically could, but then I would simply direct them to our clinic phone number and say like, this really isn't the forum for me to address this matter, to protect your privacy, here's the best way to get ahold of me through my clinic. And I would kind of leave it there. When you think about other worries or pitfalls or things that can come up, sometimes people ask, can you edit a post? And to my knowledge, Twitter's kind of thought about this, but you can't edit Twitter posts currently. It could theoretically become something, at least with the free version. You can edit some of the other options, but yeah, right now you can't edit the free version of Twitter. There's this sense that things can't come back, so like if I tweet something and then I delete it, people can take screenshots of it before I delete it, and we're going to go through a situation that kind of talks through that. You kind of have to make a choice of you and your professional brand online. Do you support your local sports team? Do you comment on political matters? Could that potentially limit how comfortable certain patients are with you? So I'm in Denver. If I posted a lot of Bronco stuff, would a Chiefs fan feel great about coming to see me since they're one of the big rivals, or an LA Raiders fan? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. So I choose not to engage on those domains specifically because I don't want to artificially limit or impact that patient-physician interaction before they even come into the clinic room. Really, the best rule of thumb online and social media or even an email is be overly nice. Be nicer than you would be in person. Really try to frame everything in a positive mindset. Try not to attack anything or take it down. Mean-spirited messages tend to not go well for anyone. And you could always probably word things better, but making sure you think before you click send is always great advice. And then, you know, sometimes it's helpful. People will put out a lot of stuff and then wonder why no one's engaging with them. And a lot of the data out there says that at least you should be doing interactions with other people's messages at about a 5 to 1 or even 20 to 1 ratio to make sure that they're engaged with your messages too. So it's kind of that you have to kind of pay it forward and let other people know that you're working on this stuff and then they'll engage with yours. So we're going to quickly jump through a situation that Monica Gutierrez has kind of shared in other talks. But in the Dallas Medical Journal, there was this message that was put in there, which, if you read it, is not an ideal message to have in a section that's talking about the gender pay gap. So someone grabs this, they post it online, and you can see Monica's response here. It's framing it and how she feels about that post. She wants to kind of encourage a bigger area highlighting the women in medicine and that she's more than happy to help assist with this. And really, when you really think about it, it doesn't always go well when you're trying to post things either. That post, are there people of other ethnic minorities in this picture? How unified is that? How diverse is that? You've got to be careful with what you flag. Ultimately, from that initial post of that Dallas Medical Journal, they ended up resigning from their role, from being a person in that group that was deciding on enrollment into those different medical disciplines or accepting certain individuals onto a house staff. So it can get complicated quick. Really, it's a matter of being nice, being out there, being open, honoring your mistakes, and trying the best you can. This isn't meant to scare you off. It's just meant to kind of help highlight that things can go wrong, and that's okay. I want to make sure we have some time for questions. Being that this is tagged for introverted individuals, potentially, if you don't feel comfortable speaking to the group that's gathered here, you can definitely post on the Ask Me Anything section. And I can see those or drop those questions into the chat. I might just jump in. I don't mean to jump ahead of anybody, but I was just curious. I guess, to be honest, I'm a little bit of a, I'm definitely not an early adopter for social media. I guess that would be probably a generous or a fair statement. And I was curious, I don't really do much at all. And I'm curious, like, if you were selling this to me, what do you find to be the most value you get out of that experience of being more engaged with social media? How might it change my professional pathway or career? Sure. If I was a little bit more engaged to see if I want to decide if I want to change anything. Yeah, so I sometimes take a few different approaches when people ask me this type of question. So, you know, Dr. Bracke is a well-known figure here in the Denver metro area. Inevitably, there are people in similar fields of practice here in Denver or at a national conference that are talking about things that you, Dr. Bracke, are interested in. And unless you're actually overhearing those conversations or you're in that room where that's happening, you're going to not hear or see that. And inevitably this conversation is a little bit as well happening online. So there are people at the annual AAPMNR conference that are talking about musculoskeletal things, PRP injections, all potential areas that you may be interested in. But you're missing that conversation because you're not witnessing it happen. And even if you're not retweeting or liking or anything like that, there's inevitably people talking about journal articles, people, other providers talking about what they're doing. Other publications that are like PMNR journal adjacent, like orthosports or other things that are putting out things that you may or may not be aware of. And unless you have a way to kind of filter that information to you, you're potentially missing out on those topics and areas of interest. I myself have gotten opportunities because I'm online, seeing what other people talking about on different domains and have been added to groups or joined research projects or got talks at national conferences because I've been more up to speed than some of my peers in a given topic area that I would have missed if I wasn't there. People are using this as a way to communicate across the nation, across our field, across the world in rehab. And it's a valuable resource to kind of see what the pulse is out there. Even if you don't post your own material. So that's my kind of pitch. So Dr. Monica Rowe out of Northwestern was someone that asked me a very similar question seven years ago, and has now developed a pretty good social media presence being one of the physicians on the U.S. National soccer team, team of physicians, and has posted things along that work that I think is great because it shares the great work that we as PMEM and our providers are doing as well. So on top of being able to see what is out there. It also is a way for us to share all the good stuff we are doing. We're a field that needs to explain itself a lot. And by jumping in on the neuro conversations, the ortho, the trauma conversations, the acute care things that we help deal with and the outpatient things that we help deal with. It's helpful for us to be in that conversation as a field because more people learn about great stuff that we do. Yeah, that's a really great point because I think given our smaller specialty, it might be more important for us to be involved in part of the conversation to elevate the conversation or the awareness of our specialty and the value of our specialty. So thanks. It's a great explanation. Oh, let me check. I clicked away for a second. Let me see if there's any more, ask me anything options here. While you're checking, I'll ask you another question. So let's say you just convinced me that I should get involved in social media. And I have, you know, an old Facebook page that I never really check and don't really do much with. Professionally, what would you say? And I know there's maybe not one right answer here, but if I were to do one thing in that space, what do you think the most high yield next step would be for me if I were moving in that direction? I think the question is what are the things that you would hope to get out of it? But kind of, not that I'm answering a question with a question, but the interest is to hear about the conversation that's happening out there in a professional sense, then Twitter might be the best spot because a lot of academic people in lots of fields in medicine use Twitter as their professional page or LinkedIn as their professional page. And that's been kind of, that's what you're interested in or how you would like to use social media, that would probably be. There are other avenues to think about. So kind of what are the things you're hoping to get out of it might direct me to help you find different platforms. I don't know if you caught that because some people froze there. I don't know if I froze. Yeah, no, I can hear you. Yeah, I think if I were, I don't want to dominate the conversation. I see some other questions coming in, but I think probably being more aware of publications that pertain to my practice that are maybe in journals that I don't typically pay attention to would probably be something I'd be interested in. And then just having some way of connecting to the conversation that's going on on maybe high profile medical articles or journal articles or topics that are very, maybe there's a new publication or something that happened recently where there's a conversation, I'd probably would be interested in hearing what leaders are saying in that and being able to engage with other physiatrists or other specialties. Totally. And I didn't specifically say this, but similar to email, like I would encourage you to use whatever profile you may pick to be a pull, not a push. So inherently Twitter wants you to be on it for as much as possible. And so when you log in first time on your phone, it wants you to get alerts on everything and you got to turn them all off and just make it the things you want. Do you want an alert every time a given journal posts something? Do you want an alert every time a given person posts something? Do you care if someone likes or retweets anything you do? And inevitably I've turned off nearly all of those notifications so that it's, I have to go into the app to get that info. I'm not bombarded with it just like another text or another message from another app. I do the same thing with email. So I'm not overwhelmed with email alerts. So use that cautiously. I see a question about what do I think about a YouTube channel? I think that's great. Kind of like I said, it's a little bit more interactive than some of the other things, but it's kind of a, you're putting an informative thing out there for other people to react to, but mostly it's there for them to listen to. And so it's more of you pushing out information as opposed to you having a conversation with a bunch of other people. It's not wrong, not right. I think it's helpful. A lot of people do things with it. And it's beneficial for a lot of individuals to kind of promote the field and things. There are a lot of great EMG videos on YouTube and things that I pull up and use to teach with residents. I think it's great. It's just a lot more work. Getting a good camera, making sure you look good, making sure whatever you're presenting looks good, animating, that's a lot. That's a higher bar of entry than setting up a Twitter page. So if you want to tackle it, great, but it's a fair amount. I was going to share another person that's really cool that's benefited from social media. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with this PM&R physician. Nationally known figure. And been lucky enough to kind of interact with them online and seeing all the great stuff that they do. And she's volunteered that she feels like in part because of her social media presence, it helped boost her to the point of notoriety that she's been able to get onto sports medicine boards of directors in different groups because she's been online talking about sports medicine and sports medicine and impaired individuals that she otherwise wouldn't have if she didn't have this presence. Beyond just the publications, beyond doing the talks to the areas that she knows, this has boosted her notoriety to the point that she's gotten positions. Also, when you think about the reach of an article, there's a whole set of metrics out there to look at how much a given article is cited in blogs, cited in Twitter, cited on Facebook. And it's a kind of a preliminary litmus test to see how engaged people are with a given topic. And there's even some institutions that are using your, beyond just how many citations you have in a given paper, how much of a reach a given article has on social media is also being included in advancement portfolios or can be highlighted when it comes around. So even if you use it as just a way to promote your own work, it has benefits beyond just posting it online. And I feel like that's going to keep coming down the field as well because it's an early marker. It's a early marker. So when you think about a paper that's put out, it may take years to get enough citations to say, like, this is a landmark article. However, if you post something, so like our guidelines on any of the various long COVID guidelines statements that we've put out there as AAP Menard Consortium, you can see how engaged people are with the various topics. You can see how engaged patients are, who's quoted it, what articles, what different news outlets have picked it up. And you can see how many people are engaging with that material well before even that first citation is. And it's kind of a good way to see what's out there and what people are talking about. I have another quick question of, do you have a rhythm or a system in place for posting? Do you try to have a certain frequency or is it really just situational when you have something to say, or do you try to keep the conversation going forward with like a monthly post? Or I'm just curious if you have anything kind of on the calendar, so to speak. You can schedule posts, which is great to do. Buffer, that other free one that I mentioned, gives you a way to schedule a whole bunch of things, which is great if you're, as a former social media editor, trying to schedule a month's worth of tweets in a night. It's a lot easier to do that than to log in every day and try and find the spot to plug it in. Buffer in particular is nice because it can say, I want this tweet to reach the Boston area at the most highest utilization time for the Boston area to see if people will engage with it. You can have some free tools that help you do that. In general, if you're Coca-Cola or you're a brand that's trying to really promote yourself, they say you should post at least three times a day. It's probably a little more than that if you're Coca-Cola because you could be Diet Coke, you could be Cherry Coke, and all those different areas are posting a lot to try and make sure you don't forget about that drink or Pepsi. I'm not excluding a sort of variety. I myself, I tend to post when I see something, like this is self-generated. So like something happened that I feel like is worth sharing, I'll put it out there when it happens. If I get a publication accepted at a place and I have a link to it, I'll let it fly. I am on there, I would say, like looking, scrolling, liking, and retweeting. I go through phases, there's weeks I don't do anything. There's weeks I do it every night for about 10 minutes. My highest utilization time is during conferences because I find like out who's talking about what, where so much faster on there. So there's people posting, oh, I'm in this talk, this is great, did you see this conversation? Oh my gosh, if you really like neuro and stroke rehab, there's a great talk going on right now. And that'll help me kind of filter what's happening out there. Should I leave the talk I'm in and go see this one? It also has helped me connect with a whole lot wider group than just my department. Cause I know who's posting about the things I'm interested in at a conference. And we can be like, hey, are you at the conference? Let's meet up, let's grab a coffee. And my peer network has grown significantly just because of being on social media and seeing who's talking about what. So conference is my highest utilization. If you look at my Twitter feed, my use just goes astronomically through the roof. I turn off my 10 minute limit and go nuts. What else? I'm trying to, we end at seven, my time, eight central, nine Eastern. So if there's some last minute things, I'm happy to hang out and chat longer, but I also want to make sure we honor everyone's time. Well, I don't see anything else coming in. So this was fantastic, Bill. So thank you so much for putting this together. It was great seeing some familiar faces on Zoom. We hope you can join us. We plan to have an in-person meetup at the annual assembly in New Orleans. So people look out for that announcement. It should be through FizForm. Speaking of social media and get on FizForm. I mean, FizForm is a really great, I think if you're new to social media, FizForm is maybe a great opportunity to just get familiar with our people, so to speak, and to have conversations about topics. And you can even have a conversation within the community. So it can be very narrow or it can be very broad, but I think that's also a great place to have some conversations about what we do. So this is great. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. And thank you again, Dr. Niehaus, for presenting. You bet. And a shameless plug. If you do listen to the RehabCast, I'm very open to feedback on how that's going. That's a very new adventure for me. And any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

social media

medical field

communication

information sharing

professional purposes

TweetDeck

online presence

professional development