Military Health System Adds Social Networking

The Military Health System (MHS) has added social networking tools including Twitter, MySpace and YouTube in a push to engage more of the individuals it serves — 18- to 24-year-olds.

To lure more of the younger troops to its Website, MHS started using Twitter in March, setting up its “healthdotmil” feed.

Consultants say that young troops prefer to access their information from media-rich sites rather than sites heavy in text, which they are more likely to view as boring.

The agency also uses sites such as YouTube to reach to the younger age group with videos on subjects ranging from prosthetic legs to golf therapy clinics for combat-wounded veterans to a short profile of an occupational therapist who works with combat-wounded veterans.

MHS posted 66 videos on YouTube in May, with the top five viewed 3,785 times. The MHS site on Facebook had 1,206 views in May, while its MySpace site had 716 views.

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