Active Social Media Management: The Case of Health Care

Given the demand for authentic personal interactions over social media, it is unclear how much firms should actively try and engage with consumers using social media. We investigate empirically what drives the degree of engagement that healthcare organizations generate by actively managing their social media presence. We find that active management of social media is more likely to generate incremental engagement from an organization’s employees than its clients. In other words, active management of social media by an organization seems more successful at boosting internal engagement than external engagement. This result holds when we explore exogenous variation in a firm’s relationships with its employees and clients that are explained by medical malpractice laws and distortions in Medicare incentives. ∗Economics Department, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA and RAND Corporation †MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT, Cambridge, MA and NBER ‡All errors are our own.