Healthcare organizations' twitter communication : an integrative review

Abstract

This integrative literature review examines how healthcare organizations communicate in Twitter and how they can communicate on Twitter. Twitter provides healthcare organizations with new ways to engage with the public and opportunities to grow in a changing environment. This thesis examines the literature on healthcare organizations’ current practice, relationship building, and identities when using Twitter. The findings address four themes related to the research question, i.e., social and organizational identity, foundational stakeholder strategies, social expectations on Twitter, and third-party healthcare organizations. This paper concludes that Twitter gives healthcare organizations the ability to move beyond knowledge sharing and be a proactive healthcare partner to Twitter users. However, healthcare organizations have limited themselves by using Twitter in a traditional communications approach simply as knowledge dissemination.

Keywords: Twitter, healthcare organizations, relationship building, digital identity and integrative literature review.