Medical Insurance and Social Media

I suspect that in coming months I will return relatively frequently to the subject of social media.

I wonder from an industry professionals prospective if the industry, insurers, brokers - any of us in fact use social media as effectively as possible to communicate to the public.

This morning I spent some time viewing some of the major UK PMI insurers twitter feeds and in the main the results are pretty bland, even allowing for the limitations of the 140 character format they're all by and large simple mini adds or re-tweets of health news stories (although to be fair that is something I do myself on a 'slow news' day).

The exception however is BUPA, to their credit many of their recent tweets seem to involve quite negative customer complaints - not sure how sensible it is to have this on their main UK twitter feed but at least they're not trying to cover up the fact that there are issues.

How should insurers use Twitter to interact with their customers ? Not sure but I think it is an excellent discussion to have ?