Study Shows Hospitals Slow To Adopt Social Media Tools

Despite proven success, only 10% of U.S. hospitals and health systems are involved in social media (California HealthCare Foundation).   Even worse, few of the 10% really take advantage of the “social” side of this medium, instead preferring to simply push out messages about services, classes, and general news.  In fact, per the study, only 6% of all tweets (in the sample) were social interactions; therefore, 94% of all hospital and healthcare tweets were simply information.

This needs to change.

For social media to work, hospitals must be social.  Rather than just tweeting news, or uploading press releases to Facebook and LinkedIn (which, by the way, is still important), why not post discussion points, such as “how can we improve our Emergency Department?”, or “we’re redesigning our waiting rooms and would like your opinion regarding the furniture, carpets and wallpaper.”

This article has great information to help, so click the link below for a more thorough read:

Tactics for Achieving ‘Socialness’