How Hospitals Are (and Should Be) Leveraging Social Media

Nearly all US hospitals have taken to social media outlets in recent years to engage patients and enhance the hospital experience. Using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, FourSquare and blogs gives clinicians the opportunity to interact with the three-quarters of adult Internet users in the US who actively use social networking sites. It also extends hospital influence much further than allowed by the one-sided telephone and mail marketing campaigns of the past. A study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) investigated the relationship between the extent of social media adoption and utilization by hospitals relative [...]