How Turkish Private Hospitals use Social media: A Qualitative Study

The purpose of this study was to examine which social media tools are mostly used by private hospitals in Ankara and to reveal the advantages and disadvantages of social media tools at an institutional level. Based on the purposive sampling method, it was decided to reach only the people within the scope of the research and hence qualitative interviews was performed with 15 people. The interviewed people consisted of managers responsible for social media activities at the corporate level hospitals. The data obtained from in-depth interviews were analyzed by content analysis. Accordingly, it was found that the social media tools most commonly used by the surveyed participants was Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram respectively, primarily for sharing health-related information and the purpose of advertisement. It was concluded that 26.6% of social media activities at the corporate level are being conducted by the communication department and the social media is mostly being used to share health related information by the hospitals. The survey also found that hospitals had increased recognition as an advantage of social media, but difficulty in deleting comments related to the hospital was found to be a disadvantage. In this research, only the social media activities of the hospitals were discussed with the managers at the institutional level Thus, future studies that evaluate the views of managers, service providers, and service users about social media are required. But the results from this study are expected to provide hospital managers with important clues for planning social media activities.