Hospitals and physician practices that don't get on board now with social media are missing a huge opportunity to build their brand, according to experts.

Three-quarters of Americans are using some sort of social media, and 85 percent of them want companies to interact with them, said Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Communications.

"If your audience is in the social spaces, then you need to be there too," Holtz advised hospital executives at a recent Web seminar hosted by CareTech Solutions. "If you don't have content there, then you fundamentally don't exist for most of those people."

Currently only 10.3 percent of hospitals are engaged in social media, but analysts say they will account for the greatest growth in social media by 2014.

Holtz said one of the most valuable ways a provider can use social media is for damage control, should your organization receive some negative press. The first 24 hours after a crisis is when the public forms an opinion. Press releases can be spun, but personal information on Twitter, for example, can spread your story by word of mouth more quickly and believably to your audience.

Hospitals and doctors can build their brand and their reputation by creating a "bank of goodwill" through stories about their care and services shared by patients and staff on social media.

A white paper published recently by SocialFish and Croydon Consulting stresses the importance of having policies in place before an organization launches a social media campaign.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish, and Leslie White, founder of Croydon Consulting, authors of the white paper, warn providers to focus on "mitigating the risks while maximizing the rewards" of social media.  This is especially true in the healthcare arena, where issues such as patient privacy and HIPAA can weigh heavily on all involved, they said.

Other advice they give includes, monitoring the social Web regularly to be sure all content found represents the organization well; setting up interdepartmental workflows for social media collaboration; writing an employee code of conduct and making sure the staff is educated on the consequences of violating social media policies.