The development of social media has opened up new opportunities in many areas, including hospitals. The presence of hospitals in social media gained special importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, when patients and the rest of the public turned to them for medical advice and other information. At the same time hospitals played an important role as credible sources of information during the infodemic. However, the use of social media by public hospitals is not well researched, nor has such or similar research been conducted in Slovenia.
With the aim to obtain more data on this topic, an analysis of social media use by Slovenian public hospitals during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was carried out in the frame of this paper. For the purpose of analysis, the author developed her own model of measuring the use of social media, which is based on parameters such as presence on social media, duration of presence in years, number of likes, number of posts, interactions, etc. As the research was carried out during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results were interpreted with this factor in mind.
The results of the research showed that a high proportion (80%) of the hospitals in question use social media. The greatest activity was detected on the social network Facebook, followed by Twitter and YouTube, whereas the least activity was observed on Instagram. The survey did not reveal specific impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the rate of new hospitals joining social media platforms. Nontheless, the impact of the pandemic can be detected in the analysis of the content hospitals posted on their social media profiles–as as many as 85% of posts were related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The results of this research are useful both for researchers in the field of healthcare and for professionals in the field of public relations, as they contribute to a deeper understanding of the use of social media in public hospitals, as well as other public healthcare organisations.
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