The Medical Leadership Competency Framework encourages both medical students and clinicians to actively engage in medical leadership and management (MLM) opportunities. The framework highlights that student-led societies are one way of achieving this objective. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of social media became paramount in actively engaging users to the field of MLM topics. This study aims to examine the effectiveness of a social media approach in actively engaging medical students and clinicians to MLM topics.

At the start of the 2020/21 academic year, the Birmingham Medical Leadership Society (BMLS) selected two medical students onto their committee with experience of social media management and building a large virtual ‘following’. They ensured regular social media posting with posters/video advertisements for all the MLM events BMLS were hosting virtually throughout the year. Platforms used were Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, ‘hashtags’ were used across all platforms (e.g. #MedTwitter, #medicalstudents, #medicalleadership, etc) to try to capture a large audience via algorithms. Social media analytics were then compared to the 2019/20 academic year.

In total across all four social media accounts, BMLS had a total of 22,159 viewers in the academic year 2020/21 (489.3% increase). The Facebook BMLS MLM content had a total of 10,215 viewers in the academic year 2020/21, compared to 2344 in 2019/20 (336.9% increase) and 656 followers. In addition, the BMLS MLM content on Instagram had 2474 views in 2020/21, compared to 813 in 2019/20 (203.3% increase) and with a total page following of 817.

The study highlight that BMLS developed a successful social media strategy during the academic year 2020/21 in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic to draw attention to MLM topics. Although not a direct measure of engagement, the results do suggest the popularity of MLM topics amongst medical students and clinicians alike globally.