With the rise of technology, many organizations and companies across the country have begun utilizing social media as a means to connect with individuals and spread news.
Healthcare organizations are no exception. A recent study from Talkwalker, a social media analytics platform, looked at Twitter data from the nation’s big five health insurers to uncover trends in their social media activities.
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Talkwalker analyzed information from Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare, all of which have both a general Twitter handle and a customer support handle.
From August 24 to August 30, there were 26,700,000 mentions of these insurers.
Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna took the cake for the top number of mentions, dominating 63.1 percent of the conversation. More than 48 percent of these mentions were negative in nature, and 41.9 percent of them were neutral. Only 9.9 percent were positive.
These statistics are unsurprising, given that Aetna was mixed up in a controversy that week. On August 24, news broke that the insurer had accidentally disclosed the HIV statuses of up to 12,000 members. That explains the surge in social media mentions between August 25 and 26.
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During the same week, the remaining four insurers came nowhere close to Aetna in terms of mentions on social media. UnitedHealthcare took up 16.7 percent of the conversation, and Humana dominated 11.2 percent of it. Anthem and Cigna lagged behind.
For these insurers, the majority of social media mentions were neutral. Notably, however, 35.4 percent of Anthem’s mentions were negative in nature, and 21.4 percent of Cigna’s were positive.
But it’s not all about mentions. It’s also useful to take a macro look at the overall impact each insurer is having on its audience.
According to Talkwalker, although Humana is the smallest of the insurers, its followers are the most engaged. From August 24 to 30, Humana saw 1,671 audience retweets, while the other insurers had numbers in the hundreds.
And while UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private healthcare provider, Talkwalker found it lags behind in social media interactions.
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