The latest Hospital Social Media update is live. We are currently at 557 Health System / Hospitals / Centers with 1090 social media listings:
- 254 YouTube Channels
- 336 Facebook pages
- 430 Twitter Accounts
- 70 Blogs
I’ve dug into the data and found some interesting results. The Social Media adoption rate is heavily skewed to larger hospitals. This graph shows a breakdown of hospitals by bed count:
The Social Media adoption numbers come from the 460 hospitals on my list that have publicly available bed counts. The U.S. bed count data is based on information from the 2010 Billian’s Health Data Blue book, and public data from the 2002 AHA survey. The total number of U.S. hospitals and bed count breakdown were remarkably close from both sources.
The disparity should not be a surprise. Smaller hospitals, like those with less than 100 beds, have less resources to invest in most outward facing services. There’s usually only one person responsible for everything – marketing, public affairs, media relations, web development, philanthropy, etc. No wonder social media isn’t a priority. In fact only 14% (65) of the hospitals on my list have less than 100 beds, and 86% (395) have more than 100.
So let’s do the math. Assume there are 6,000 US hospitals.
50% of them have less than 100 beds, so that leaves 3,000 viable hospitals
But don’t forget that social media is blocked at many hospitals. I don’t have solid numbers, but a 50% block rate feels right. I don’t expect employees to work from home in order to maintain their employers Social Media presence (though some do), so we are now at 1,500 hospitals.
In addition to the 395 distinct 100+ bed hospitals on my list, there are 82 Health Care Systems doing centralized social media. Let’s take a very conservative average of 5 hospitals per system. That equals another 410 hospitals in the social media space.
We are now at 805 hospitals out of 1,500 doing some sort of social media.
That’s a 53% adoption rate.
Not bad for a conservative industry like health care.
Of course we can do better, (opening up access is our biggest hurdle) – but I think it’s time to stop beating up on our industry.
Feedback is welcome, I encourage you to download the raw data and do your own analysis. Folks that find basic flaws in my numbers or logic are encouraged to contact me – I want to hear from you.
People that nit-pick irrelevant details or misuse this data will be ignored.
by Ed Bennett on October 4, 2009
in Web Stats
Hello everyone – I just finished an update to the big list. Please take a look and make sure your information is correct. It should have all submissions to date, but sometimes I miss a few.
The current numbers are 391 Hospitals total across:
194 YouTube Channels
203 Facebook pages
284 Twitter Accounts
44 Blogs
Full list here
Charts and Excel file here
A big update this week.
The list now follows 193 Hospitals on 121 YouTube Channels, 82 Facebook pages, 103 Twitter accounts and 20 Blogs.
New to the list:
Avera Health, Sioux Falls, SD on YouTube
Barnes-Jewish Hospital St. Louis, MO, on Twitter
Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chigaco, IL is on Twitter
Cooks Children’s in Fort Worth TX on Twitter
Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Mephis, TN on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter
Mercy Hospital Medical Center in Des Moines, IA on Facebook
Northside Hospital, St. Petersburg, FL on Twitter
Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Sarasota FL on Twitter
St. Francis Hospital, Indianapolis, IN has a Blog and is on Twitter
St. Johns Hospital in Springfield, MO on Twitter
St. Lukes Hospital in Houston TX on Twitter
Siteman Cancer Center St. Louis, MO on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube
VCU Medical Center in Richmond, VA on Twitter
Washington Hospital Healthcare in Fremont, CA on YouTube
How Am I Doing?
Ranking lists have always been popular. The Billboard Top 100, The New York Times Best-Sellers Lists, and the Dave Letterman Top 10 List are just a few examples. It’s no surprise that after the Web took off in the mid-90’s, Web popularity tools came along that claimed to rank websites by traffic.
The most popular service was Alexa, which gathered data by offering a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Released in 1997, this toolbar offered functionality missing in early versions of IE, and was installed by hundreds of thousands of people across the Internet. In exchange for the extra features, the software tracked websites visited by the users and reported this information back to Alexa.
The quality of their data has always been criticized – just do a Google search on “alexa accuracy” for hundreds of articles on this topic. The primary problem is with low-traffic sites, which are the majority of sites out there. There’s just not enough sample data coming in for an accurate ranking.
In the past few years, competitors have appeared who use more advanced techniques for data gathering and analysis. The two services getting the most attention are Compete.com and Quantcast.com.
Back in 2006 I decided to research these services in more detail. Using the hospital websites listed in U.S. News and World Report as a starting point, I tracked the rankings for each hospital across all three services. There’s still a noise issue. The top 20 hospital sites were pretty consistent across all services, but it gets more jumbled once you get down to sites with less than 100,000 monthly visitors.
Despite this, one service stood out. Quantcast.com had accurate numbers for all of my websites, even ones with only a few thousand visitors a month (See this example). Their data gathering combines panel measurement, along with raw ISP traffic logs from major service providers. Their full methodology is detailed here (caution – lots of buzzwords)
Spot checks with the Web managers of a few dozen sites on the list confirmed that the Quantcast numbers were close – usually within 25% of the actual number. They also offer additional demographic data on site visitors, which makes it a good market research tool.
I continue to track hospital site rankings, and have expanded the list to include some of the large commercial and government medical sites. Now, however, the data comes from Quantcast alone.
You can access the data set in Google Docs
Quantcast data was checked on Feb 8, 2009, so it can be seen a snapshot of site activity. Obviously. the numbers change all the time, but over the past three years I’ve found most stay at a consistent level of traffic. The spreadsheet has data on over 370 organizations. It also has links to the hospitals YouTube, Facebook and Twitter sites.
I welcome your feedback and comments. Let me know if you find this useful.
(note – this is an update of my article posted on webiscope.com in August, 2007)
