Institutional health communication and social media: Exploring Italian hospitals' use of social media pages.

Introduction: Hospitals play a potentially crucial role in public health, and social media can be powerful tools to reach their target audiences but are hospitals exploiting them to their full potential?

Methods: We retrieved the institutional webpages and the social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Telegram) of all Italian public hospitals located in regional capitals ( = 194). From 1 March to 30 April 2022, we analysed these profiles, noting the number of followers and of posts published, the date of the last post, and the availability of a social media policy. We selected the most active 53 social media profiles (belonging to 33 hospital facilities) for a closer content analysis. Engagement was measured through numbers of reactions, comments and shares to posts published from 1 to 30 April 2022.

Results: About 36.6% of hospitals had a social media profile, and 18.3% had a social media policy. Most (87%) used Facebook as their main platform. They posted most frequently about hospital events and activities (48.3% of the socially active set). Overall, engagement was modest, as on average 0.62% of potential users reacted to a post. The same post often appeared without modifications across different platforms (82.3% of cases for Instagram, 37.8% for X (Twitter) compared to Facebook).

Conclusions: Italian public hospitals did not seem to have a clear social media policy nor strategy, and social media remained underused. Italian hospitals, therefore, appeared to be missing valuable opportunities to reach out to their patients and communities.