Online Reputation Management in Spanish Public Hospitals. A Quantitative Analysis

Spanish public hospitals face an increasingly complicated situation because of limited budgets, patients’ new requirements and the development of private hospital groups. To deal with this challenging framework and reinforce their strategic positionings in the health market, some public hospitals have implemented corporate communication strategies based on social media platforms. This paper aims to analyze how Spanish public hospitals manage Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, as well as their corporate websites, to promote their brands and reinforce their strategic positionings. To do that, we conducted a literature review about health communication, and then we resorted to 48 indicators to analyze how the 100 best Spanish public hospitals used their websites and these three social media platforms for branding purposes. We concluded that most public hospitals in this country resorted to their corporate websites to disseminate journalistic content; they used Facebook and Twitter to publish visual information about the hospital (logo, videos, etc.); and they managed Youtube to describe medical treatments and internal protocols.