Growing use of social media by hospitals

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The company Comfluence conducted a study to decipher the use of social media in hospitals during this health crisis. Discovery of the main results.

At a time of hypermediatization of health, the public hospital must communicate more than ever to express its values, promote its image and cope in the event of a crisis. For the hospital, social networks represent an exceptional tool for communication with its various audiences: patients, communities, local authorities, suppliers, but also their internal audience and the general public.

Healthcare establishments are not immune to this phenomenon of social networks either. They see an interest in it, in particular for:

• Establish the hospital’s roots with its patients in its territory

• Give visibility to the actions carried out

• Promote its services or relay public health campaigns

• Share information

Social networks at the heart of hospital crisis communication

Many hospitals make social networks the basis of hospital communication but still have to integrate the fact that being present on social media does not only consist in publishing information but in bringing together audiences, arousing commitment or creating visibility.

Before the crisis, social networks were already well established in the communications systems of CHU-CHRUs.

The majority of CHUs have a daily or weekly publication frequency on Twitter, a network which indeed requires an active presence. Conversely, LinkedIn allows a longer life for publications. It is however interesting to note a strong investment of 45% of the CHU-CHRUs which publish posts daily.

This periodicity is one of the keys to the visibility of the rise in importance of subscribers to different accounts, in particular with regard to Facebook and Twitter. A small minority of establishments (12% of CHUs and CHRUs)has a monthly rate of publication on social networks.

An intensification of the use of social media during the crisis

On Twitter, the volume of speeches from CHU / CHRU reached a peak during the pandemic:

• 1/3 of hospital tweets concerned the pandemic

• a daily peak of 1,400 tweets in mid-March 2020.

• the most used keywords are linked to the Coronavirus epidemic: Covid, barrier gestures, support for caregivers …

• the commitment to publications relating to Covid-19 (97.1 K) represents half of the commitment of all publications over the last 12 months (199.6 K).

“Through all the functionalities provided by social networks, the communication services have fulfilled their mission of information and prevention and have become a real unifying link for the diversity of actors involved in crisis management. They brought commitments and operational responsibility as close as possible to the field, gained in agility, often in an emergency, in the face of multiple daily challenges.”Comfluence analysis.

In addition, this study indicates “the emergence of dematerialized social systems in which communication services were sometimes integrated or benefited from the flow of decisions. Cohesion was strongly favored by these instant exchanges. This collective communication between professional and inter-professional groups has imposed itself on the collective which, in normal times, is often compartmentalized and crossed by divergent interests.“. For example, the Whatsapp application has been widely used and has proven to be a good vehicle for transmitting information for decision-making purposes.

With the COVID crisis, the digital communication of hospitals has taken a major and unprecedented step. Social networks have decompartmentalised hospital communication through two massive trends: their strength in relaying and unifying the hospital’s voice, their ability to be part of a societal communication allowing to reachbroad stakeholders.

Hospital communication finds with social networks (if it did not already have it in certain hospitals) the possibility of becoming a central element of an establishment’s strategy; better, to be able to take its full part in it.

Consult the entire study by clicking on the image below:

This analysis was carried out in open source, using data freely accessible on the web: websites, media, social networks of CHU-CHRUs (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). It was supplemented with Talkwalker. It lists their number of subscribers, the news published, the frequency of publication, the subjects selected and collects representative examples of the notable evolutions / adaptations carried out in 2020 by the CHU / CHRU / CH.

Source: Comfluence

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