Social media adoption framework for aged care service providers in Australia

Abstract

Abstract-The aged care sector has been a late adopter of social media platforms for communicating, collaborating, marketing and creating brand awareness, and particularly there is little research that examines the adoption of social media by aged care service providers for these purposes. This research is to review the status of social media adoption in the Australian aged care industry, to understand in what ways social media can serve older people's needs, and to develop recommendations for aged-care service providers to adopt social media applications to empower older people. Through review of the literature and interviews with Australian experts, this research provides a three-phase framework. The first phase is to adopt major public social media platforms, Facebook followed by Instagram and Twitter. The second phase should encourage posts and feedback by locally hosted member forums. The third phase should include specialised social applications for closed groups and specific functions. The paper finally discusses implications of the proposed guidelines and proposes directions for future research