A Social Media Guide to Quality and Credibility in Medical Resources

What you should do to be included in the curated selections of Webicina.com

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Using social media for medical purposes offers great advantages but also comes with great responsibility.

At Webicina.com, we receive thousands of suggestions week by week about which social media channels should be added to our database and many times we have to provide authors with the same suggestions in order to improve the quality of their resources.

Therefore we thought we should come up with a list of tips and pieces of advice about improving a medical social media channel.

We hope you will find these useful!

Best regards,

Dr. Bertalan Mesko

Managing director of Webicina.com

A Social Media Guide to Quality and Credibility

1 Introduction

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1) Creating your profile

•Use your real and full name

•Avoid including inappropriate words in the username

•Provide valid information about your background, work and skills in the short biography

•Use a normal and real photo of yourself

•If you don’t have a website, add the URL of your LinkedIn profile

2) Tips about using Twitter in the right way

•A user with only retweets does not really provide content, you should also share your own

thoughts besides retweeting others’ messages

•Using proper hashtags is a wise decision (e.g. #hcsm for messages about healthcare and social

media)

•Be kind and responsive, do not expect help if you are not helpful yourself

•Do not mix your personal and professional lives

•Share interesting, useful news, thoughts and opinions

•1-2 tweets per hour should be enough, try not flooding people with messages (except at

conference tweeting sessions)

•Help Twitter by reporting spam accounts

2 Twitter

A Social Media Guide to Quality and Credibility

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•Add a clear description about your site

•Include details and contact addresses of the authors or moderators

•Add a medical disclaimer and state clearly who is intended to use the site

•Do not use Facebook for competitions and contests on your page

•Include original source when citing any articles or news

•In case of forums, describe all the rules and make these clear to the members

A few tips for assessing the quality of basically any types of online medical resources:

•It should be easy to find out who runs the website

•It should be clear who pays for the website or if it is non-profit

•The purpose/mission statement of the website should be described

•The original source of the website's information should be available

•It should be easy to tell where the information comes from

•Time and date of the articles as well as the information included in them should

be stated

3 Community sites

A Social Media Guide to Quality and Credibility

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•Add an „About” page to your blog in which you describe the mission statement

and the rationale behind writing your blog

•Include your real name, affiliation and contact addresses (at least e-mail) in the

sidebar or the „About” page

•Add a clear disclaimer if you write about medical issues

•Add a clearly recognizable RSS button to your blog, if you don’t have one, use

Feedburner.com

•Tag your posts properly, it helps people find the content they need

•Include references in your posts, link back to the original source of information

•Add a proper license to your blog (e.g. Creative Commons)

•Upload pictures to your own server and/or link back to the original source of the

picture

•You should post under your real name instead of a username

•Clearly accessible archives show you have experience and background

4 Medical blogs

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•Use your real name as the owner of the channel

•Add a proper name to your channel (no Caps lock, no

symbols)

•Tag and name videos properly

•Comments should be allowed on your channel

•Add a description to the channel with contact addresses

•Separate your professional and personal Youtube accounts

5 Youtube

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If you are not sure about any of these or don’t know how to do it right, we are more

than happy to help. Just ask us!

info@webicina.com

Twitter.com/Berci

Skype: ncurse

6 Contact us!

A Social Media Guide to Quality and Credibility