Information Systems Research 2012
Active Social Media Management: The Case of Health Care
Abstract
Given the demand for authentic personal interactions over social media, it is unclear how much firms should actively manage their social media presence. We study this question empirically in a health care setting. We show that active social media management drives more user-generated content. However, we find that this is due to an incremental increase in user postings from an organization's employees rather than from its clients. This result holds when we explore exogenous variation in social media policies, employees, and clients that are explained by medical marketing laws, medical malpractice laws, and distortions in Medicare incentives. Further examination suggests that content being generated mainly by employees can be avoided if a firm's postings are entirely client focused. However, most firm postings seem not to be specifically targeted to clients' interests, instead highlighting more general observations or achievements of the firm itself. We show that untargeted postings like these provoke acti...
- DOI
- 10.1287/isre.1120.0466
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex