Medical influence: what does success look like?

Background: Social media influencers have revolutionized information, gaining viewers, retention, and interest with short videos. Medical teams could potentially benefit from this medium for educating patients. Defining success in this endeavor remains unclear. Objective: We are a surgeon-nurse team that sought to promote our messages on social media to gain viewers and interest in our website. Design: An educational podcast focusing on end-of-life discussions was linked to social media platforms, including Methods: Eleven podcast episodes were produced and published over a 3-month period, between November 2023 and January 2024. The podcast episodes were promoted to "similar clients" based on internal algorithms by a podcast streaming service, Results: After 3 months of publishing podcast episodes on Conclusion: Our own experience with social media promotion was inadequate in generating interest in our content. The authors would encourage other teams to be strategic with paid promotions and to consider engaging a marketing expert to improve the potential for mass interest in content and promotional efficiency. Additionally, based on these findings, the authors would appreciate more transparency in the algorithms behind successful promotions to better understand "what success looks like" for medical messaging.