Evaluation of website and social media sites of private hospitals with health tourism authority certificate that provide medical tourism services: Antalya province example

In this study, it was aimed to evaluate the web and social media sites of private hospitals with health tourism authorization certificates that provide medical tourism services in Antalya, and for this purpose, content analysis was carried out to include 10 private hospitals determined as a simple random sample. The examined websites and social media accounts of the hospitals selected as a sample were examined using the content analysis method. According to the analysis results, all 10 private hospitals included in the research have an active website, and all of these sites have information about the history of the facility, in-site search feature, contact form, corporate information, information about physicians, links to social networks and visuals that are suitable for health tourism. However, it was observed that only 6 of the hospitals had an active Facebook page. In this sense, it can be concluded that Facebook has lost its popularity compared to other social media accounts and is not given much importance by businesses. It was also determined that 8 of the hospitals had active Instagram accounts. When Instagram posts were examined, it was determined that 8 hospitals were active in providing information about diseases, healthy life recommendations, special day messages and profile updates. Finally, there are 9 private hospitals with active YouTube accounts. It was determined that 9 of these hospitals shared videos that were informative about diseases and gave healthy life suggestions. The most important finding in the study results was that care was not taken to share posts in foreign languages on social media accounts and no hospital actively shared posts in a foreign language. Suggestions have been made that the concept of language, which is the most important component in health tourism, should be considered as a more noteworthy element by institutions approved by the Ministry of Health of our country, that SEO studies should be carried out for websites, and that more attention should be paid to social media, especially Facebook.