To influence the Mount Sinai Health System’s reputation, the Social Media Department has trained physicians from various service areas to be brand ambassadors on either Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. This initiative enables physicians to drive awareness, educate patients, debunk medical misinformation online, and to improve reputational scores across Mount Sinai’s U.S. News and World Report ranked specialties. Physicians are responsible for managing their own social media accounts with support from the Social Media Department.
While this had been widely successful with physicians, the Mount Sinai Social Media Department explored other opportunities to help continue expand the ambassador program. In mid-2022, the program expanded to medical students, graduate students, and researchers. This specific cohort of ambassadors represented the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, an international leader in medical and scientific training, biomedical research, and patient care. It is the medical school for the Mount Sinai Health System.
To begin executing the Social Media Ambassador Summit, the Social Media Department introduced the program strategy and plan to Mount Sinai Health System service line department chairs. We then asked the department chairs to nominate physicians to join the ambassador program. After nominations took place, our team met with the various physicians to determine whether they would create a Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Instagram account. Once the platforms were chosen, our team designed courses for each platform. These courses covered: platform technical features, best practices, and analytics. We scheduled social media trainings with each individual physician on their desired platforms. During these trainings, we also assisted in the development of their accounts.
As ambassadors completed their onboarding, we connected their social media channels to our analytics tool and developed a leaderboard. This leaderboard helped our team track each ambassador's social media performance– follower growth, engagement, video views, and more.
This initiative helped us execute our user-generated content strategy for our larger institutional accounts. We were able to repurpose and share content that our ambassadors were creating that were relevant to our own audiences. Whether it were links to research publications or even TikTok videos, there has been an abundance of content that our Social Media Department is able to work with.
While continuing to measure the success of this program for physicians, our team decided to expand the program to our medical school. Working with school leadership, we identified students and researchers that would be a perfect fit for the program. Each nominated ambassador underwent their social media platform trainings before becoming fully active on social media.
Since the launch of the Social Media Ambassador Summit in February 2020, the following results were generated:
The following areas are represented in the program:
When the program first launched, we originally had 20 ambassadors. As the ambassadors became more active on social media, their colleagues were interested in participating as well. We continue to recruit new members to our program.
