The following is a guest post by John Mack, Editor & Publisher of Pharma Marketing News
Virtually all pharmaceutical company Twitter accounts post mostly corporate news. These corporate Twitter accounts are not likely to be followed by patients. An analysis by Phil Baumann offered some proof that this is indeed the case (see “Do Normal People Follow Big Pharma On Twitter?”; http://bit.ly/9YJrxf).
Novo Nordisk, which has a Levemir-branded Twitter account (Race with Insulin), is the exception. However, that account so far has focused only on marketing and posting the daily trials, tribulations, and hopefully victories of Charlie Kimball, a Levemir-branded spokesperson with diabetes and racecar driver.
Twitter has often been hyped as a great way to support customers. The customers of pharma are physicians and patients. But even pharma branded Twitter accounts like Race with Insulin offer very little in terms of patient support.
A branded, patient-focused Twitter account can be used in many ways to support patients. Such a Twitter account can deliver appropriate messages to followers who opt-in to follow via notices on the brand.com web site. Because of the viral nature of Twitter, one follower can lead to many more with very little extra effort or expense on the part of the sponsoring pharma company. If the posts are relevant to patient needs, followers will RT (re-tweet) and recommend that others follow.
Kru Research has written up a nice review of this topic in the eBook: Using Twitter for e-Patient Communications (http://tinyurl.com/cwqfza).
What do you think? Should pharma companies use Twitter for patient support? If so, what types of applications would work best? I’ve prepared a survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NJGDXDX) that asks your opinion of using Twitter in this fashion and what you think would be the regulatory, corporate cultural, training, and other barriers that would need to be overcome to achieve success.
Specifically, the survey asks how effective Twitter can be in carrying out each of the following patient support activities/communications:
• Drug/device safety alerts (eg, drug recalls, medical device malfunctions, emerging safety issues)
• Prescription management, including pharmacy refill reminders
• Daily health tips from authoritative sources
• Publishing disease-specific tips
• Clinical trial awareness & recruitment
• Enhancing health-related support groups (e.g. buddy-systems for depression)
• Providing around-the-clock disease management
• Patient-sharing of health-related experiences
• Issuing dietary/lifestyle tips
• Delivering adherence and compliance messages
Please take 2 minutes to answer this survey about how effective Twitter can be in carrying patient support activities/communications. Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NJGDXDX
You will be able to see a summary of up-to-date de-identified results upon completion of the survey.
Results of this survey may be summarized in an issue of Pharma Marketing News.
Your comments are confidential (anonymous) unless you specifically provide your contact information at the end of the survey and allow us to attribute comments to you personally.
John Mack, Editor & Publisher
Pharma Marketing News/Pharma Marketing Blog