**5. Conclusions**

However, organizations and professional associations in the health field are increasingly examining the potential of social media to allow members to share knowledge and engage their publics [54], these activities in o fficial medical colleges were under researched [5,24].

Spanish o fficial medical colleges, with a total of 52 locations distributed in each of the Spanish provinces and with 267,995 registered doctors, are considered one of the most important health institutions in the country.

Unlike other health institutions, communication is essential for the o fficial medical colleges in Spain. Therefore, they have communication cabinets with professionals specialized in communication with extensive knowledge in the work they develop as part of their sta ff with more than five years' experience. Their professionals have degrees in journalism and/or public relations and are mostly women.

They have shown a strong relationship with stakeholders such as health professionals, health institutions, hospitals, patients and their families and society in general. Consequently, it can be

stated that RQ1 can be answered in the a ffirmative, the o fficial medical colleges represented by their communication experts are valid interlocutors with their stakeholders.

OMC' professionals analyzed and verified the social media information of their stakeholders. Social media are a valid source of information for aspects related to new developments in the field of health.

All the communication professionals consulted use social media for their work. Twitter and Facebook are the most widely used; Twitter being the most popular (87.5%), followed by Facebook (81.3%). It coincides with Ahmed [80], that points out the most important social media for health conversations is Twitter, where it is also possible to extract tweets for academic research purposes. Through social media there can be the possibility of key debates and relationships with other stakeholders related to health topics.

The credibility of the corporate social media of health institutions and hospitals, based on the veracity of the information they publish, is well appreciated by communication professionals at the official medical colleges of Spain. However, it is significant that a percentage of the participants considered that these hospital contents are not su fficiently complete to serve their interests, and therefore are unsatisfactory.

The value a fforded by the communication established by hospitals through their corporate social media has been useful in analyzing the influence of these contents on the daily practice of professionals specialized in health working in the communication departments of the Spanish o fficial medical colleges. The contribution of these professionals, as intermediaries between the health institutions and the society in the construction of reality, has revealed strengths and weaknesses of hospital social media.

With the purpose of bringing the professionals on both sides closer together and making their relationship more successful those in charge of hospital communication, would must rise to the challenge of active listening to the communication specialists of the Spanish o fficial medical colleges.

This finding coincides with Castilla [24]. Those in charge of setting the health agenda have expressed that in such circumstances, they would become more permeable to information coming from hospital social media, which would play a more significant role as relevant sources of information. This fact would reverse the percentages of credibility obtained in this respect.

These professionals find social media relevant, they know their potential and value the volume of information that they can access through them, even if their contents make up only portion of their agenda-setting. In this sense, most professionals consider that social media are one more tool that they can use in their work, but few of them include them how only as a source of content. Fulfilling research question three.

There is no total consensus among those interviewed that social media is the best channel of information in the context of health crises. For them there is much noise on social media with unconfirmed or fake news.

Most of the experts sugges<sup>t</sup> social media as the main communication channel with stakeholders in the future.

#### *Limitations and Future Research Lines*

First, since this is an exploratory study of the behavior of o fficial medical colleges, it is not possible to measure development in the medium term, and a lengthier study is needed in order to advance. Other qualitative research techniques such as content analysis on social media could be integrated in order to perform more in-depth analysis. Second, research has only focused on Spain, so further empirical research should be conducted in di fferent regions, which would be of interest to make comparisons with other countries. The limitations identified are the basis for the design of future lines of research.

**Author Contributions:** All authors contributed equally to this study. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research has received funds from a Plan Propio of University of Malaga.

**Acknowledgments:** Our special gratitude to the Official Medical colleges participants.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
