I consider myself a child of #MedTwitter, and found it to be the ultimate platform to express myself, learn from colleagues, entertain, and build relationships. Patient education was never a broad part of my purpose when I initially engaged. In fact, I don’t think I had formulated a coherent purpose. That has changed over the last few years for multiple reasons. First, I have become increasingly aware of how much video content our patients are seeking for their personal health information. Gone are the days where folks are pursuing information through WebMD articles alone. Now, video is king. I’ve intermittently dabbled with YouTube, and there are certainly a lot of patients there seeking medical content.

So why TikTok? Two reasons predominate. One, YouTube can be very time intensive, and unless you have a large audience it may not be worth the time to produce the type of content that does well there. Second is the 21st century attention span is short and the short, vertical videos on TikTok fit that just right. In fact, YouTube has added “Shorts,” which are vertical videos of 1 minute or less, to accommodate this genre.

I was a reluctant convert to TikTok and had even blasted it on Twitter as recently as last year. I stuck my toe in the water last fall and have enjoyed the journey despite my ignorance. An uncomfortable truth is that in order to educate, you are going to have to entertain. Most accounts with any following on TikTok will occasionally dance, tell jokes, Hula-Hoop, or do something your medical education didn’t teach you. But behind this veneer you will find folks teaching medicine and telling important stories in an approachable way.

What are my takeaways regarding engaging in TikTok as a physician?

1. Speak to what you know. Your niche and understanding are going to be important to the audience. While those who progress to the TikTok influencer sphere will inevitability want to work on lighting, get a good microphone at first and deliver what you know and think is important.
2. Don’t let likes and followers become your main motivation. Few of us will earn significant income from our content. That said, studies have shown that likes and new followers activate reward brain centers.¹ They can become addictive. This can become a rabbit hole for your time and energies, yet our most important connections can never happen through a screen.
3. Have a plan. This may sound odd, but understand what you want from TikTok. Do you want to just scroll and enjoy? Do you want to educate? Do you want to build a brand? Think about where you fall on that spectrum and decide how much time you will spend and how you will do that.
4. Understand your context. I don’t need to explain to anyone that it’s been a weird few years to be a doctor. On social media it is inevitable that physicians will be scrutinized. Expectations about how a physician will behave are going to vary by the audience member, yet it is important for all physicians to understand the expectations of their patient population, local colleagues, and administrators.

The important thing to remember is that any engagement with social media should add value to your life. It’s not right for everyone. It can become unhealthy. Yet it remains an area where I believe we can add value to our lives and the lives of our patients.