Abstract

Individuals can learn many information about health from the internet now. Accuracy and reliability of information learned on the Internet is important in this sense. Hospitals play an important role in reaching accurate and reliable information on health. Today, institutions and organizations communicate with their target audiences using traditional means of communication and also social media tools. It is important how hospitals that contribute to the increase of health literacy communicate with their target audience and how they maintain this communication. It is especially important for health institutions to share information on health, disease and conscious nutrition in social media. In addition, social media offers advantages to public relations with its fast and low-cost features compared to other mass media. In addition, opportunity for target audience to obtain information about their thoughts leads organizations to use social media tools. In this context, subject of study is how hospitals using public and private universities use social media. Facebook accounts of the hospitals were analyzed by content analysis method and then the data obtained was evaluated. As a result, it was determined that majority of public university hospitals did not actively use social media. It was determined that those who used it shared more content such as announcements, hospital studies, congresses and seminars, and that foundation university hospitals actively used social media and shared more informative contents about health. It has also been determined that private university hospitals also benefit from Facebook's bidirectional communication, and that public university hospitals only use Facebook to share information and not communicate with their followers.