Imperial College London
Alternate

ProfessorAndreasEisingerich

Business School

Professor of Marketing
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 9763a.eisingerich

 
 
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Location

 

386DBusiness School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Parmar:2018:10.2196/10109,
author = {Parmar, N and Dong, L and Eisingerich, A},
doi = {10.2196/10109},
journal = {Journal of Medical Internet Research},
title = {Connecting with your dentist on Facebook? Patients’ and dentists’ attitudes towards Social Media usage in dentistry},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/10109},
volume = {20},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Background: Social media has begun to proliferate across medical areas and transformed how medical professionals serve and interact with their patients. It offers a new communication avenue that has the potential to engage patients and, hence, may be used to create value for both medical professionals and patients. In dentistry, even though patients and dentists frequently use social media in their personal lives, little is known about their attitudes and expectations toward using social media for professional interactions.Objective: In this paper, we focus on the role of social media in dentistry. Specifically, we explore patients’ and dentists’ attitudes toward social media usage and their current online behaviors in this context. Furthermore, we examine potential challenges and opportunities regarding dentists’ adoption of social media practices.Methods: This research employed a large-scale online survey of 588 patients and 532 dental professionals. We assessed the attitudes, expectations, and social media behaviors from both patients’ and dentists’ perspectives.Results: We found that more than 55% (290/532) of dentists in our sample have accounts for their dental practice on various social media platforms. Interestingly, while 73% (374/511) of patients did not expect their dental practice to have a social media presence, and 44% (207/468) thought that establishing a friendship with their dentists is not appropriate, the findings show that 36% (164/460) of patients had searched for their dentists, and 44% (207/470) of them were happy to establish contacts with dentists on social media. Furthermore, the findings highlight that patients were interested in exploring additional information such as online reviews and the qualifications of their dentists on Facebook pages. For dentists, more than half (375/432, 83%) of them in our sample thought that social media marketing is more efficient compared to traditional marketing.Conclusions: Ou
AU  - Parmar,N
AU  - Dong,L
AU  - Eisingerich,A
DO  - 10.2196/10109
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 1438-8871
TI  - Connecting with your dentist on Facebook? Patients’ and dentists’ attitudes towards Social Media usage in dentistry
T2  - Journal of Medical Internet Research
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/10109
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/61583
VL  - 20
ER  -
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