Social Media Trends with a Focus on Health Care

What are some of the social media trends in health care today?

A brief look at these statistics and trends in health care on the social web should help organizations understand the impact of engaging with social media tools to help in spreading their message. It does not matter if you are a pharma company trying to connect with patients, or if you are a medical education provider looking for ways to utilize social bookmarking.

Social media may have its roots in the trendy tweener population but is growing trees of marketing data that the health care industry can utilize to improve their message delivery and improve the healthcare information being consumed online in the social media landscape.

This video is helping to advertise the Health Care New Media Conference in mid June. I have pulled many of the statistics about social media trends in health care from the video and included them below for easier reading and comparison.

• Trends in Social Media and Health Care
• 60 Million consumers are using new media to interact and share their health experiences online
• 250 hospitals use social media
• 93% of e-patients said that the internet made it possible to ge the medical information that they needed
• Health Care Information Technology now represents a $36.7 Billion/year market
• Search Engine Trends
• 93% of global consumers use search engines to find and access websites
• 72% of e-patients searched for medical information just before or after a doctor's visit
• Facebook Trends
• Facebook has 175 Million active users
• 3.5 Million users become fans of Facebook pages each day
• Roughly 1,200 Facebook communities advocate for cures for different chronic illnesses
• 83 hospitals have Facebook Pages
• Twitter Trends
• Feb 2008 - 475,000 unique visitors.
• Feb 2009 - 7,000,000 unique visitors.
• 160 U.S. hospitals have Twitter accounts
• YouTube Trends
• 100,000,000 Million Videos viewed on YouTube every day.
• 131 hospitals have YouTube Channels in the US
• Other Social Media Trends
• 77% of active internet users read blogs - Universal McCann (March 2008)
• 23 Million Americans have downloaded and listened to an audio podcast in the past month - Edison Media Research

Feel free to add more stastistics and social media trends, especially for healthcare, in the comments. I will also see if I can find the sources for these statistics in the future.