COVID-19 Social Media Analysis for Midwest Health Care Organizations

Social media plays a very important role in society in today’s day and age. Many industries and organizations utilize social media to advertise their products and services, recruit potential employees and interact with their customers in an informal manner. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became an even more important element of society. With social distancing being strongly encouraged world-wide, social media was an easy way to keep in touch with those people and communities you could no longer physically see. For organizations in all industries, social media became one of the main modes of communicating with consumers. For health care organizations, social media became one of the main modes of communicating COVID-19 related news, updates and FAQs with their patients and communities. Due to this phenomenon, an analysis of Midwest health care organizations’ current social media presence would help these organizations recognize their strengths and weaknesses when it came to corresponding about COVID-19 topics via social media. To achieve this analysis, tweets associated with a handful of Midwest health care organizations were collected from Twitter. Part of the analysis focused on the sentiment of those tweets and the other part of the analysis focused on the actual content of those tweets. Each health care organization was analyzed individually and then analyzed against the other organizations to see how they compared. After the analysis was complete, the findings were presented and recommendations were made for how each of the health care organizations could improve their social media presence when it came to COVID-19.