Beyond its impressive reach, Twitter has furthermore created an unprecedented opportunity to influence highly targeted pockets of conversations. It thus provides pharma with the unique chance to demonstrate that it can be open and transparent by providing value added information in disease areas of strategic importance. It is an opportunity to show how much a company cares about its customers and patients simply by injecting the right information at the right time in a conversation.

The exhibit above the visualization of a sample of pharma followers that stated an interest in a specific therapeutic area. The bigger the bubble the larger the interest. This clearly shows that most pharma followers are most receptive to content in Oncology or diabetes, which in turn then proves that via smart engagement a company can build its presence selectively around specific topics and target audiences.

The next graph below illustrates different companies’ reach within stakeholders interested in oncology. As we can see, Boehringer, via great content and engagement, especially with patient advocacy stakeholders manages to outperform competitors, reaping the highest relevant reach in Oncology, a strategically important therapeutic area for all three companies.

Boehringer achieved this strong presence by identifying active and relevant stakeholders online via listening and engaging. Using hashtags, @replies and Direct message functionalities, a company can thus reach specific target audiences on twitter and highlight content that is relevant to them.
The reach within these stakeholder groups is almost less important though than the fact that twitter provides pharma with a way to directly engage with them via direct messaging and @replies. Unfortunately, this is also exactly what has slowed down twitter’s, and social media’s, adoption in pharma.
The pharmaceutical industry is regulated along stakeholder communications. Yet twitter, unlike regulations, does not usually grant us the knowledge as to exactly which stakeholder was reached with which message. It also makes no provisions for the type of immediate and continuous exchange that social media is based on.

We hope that with this ground breaking benchmarking analysis, we can spurr the discussions necessary to change pharma’s approach to twitter.  At the upcoming 7th eyeforpharma conference eMarketing and mobile conference in Barcelona March 27th-28th, we hope to shed light on the high relevance and engagement twitter enables. We also want to facilitate the appreciation and understanding that pharma companies have of their followers: They are not just numbers in social media audits, but new channels to important existing and new stakeholders. Twitter is a new communication’s method that necessitating new approaches.
Find out more about our studies here and here.
Enter “eyeforpharma” to receive a 50% discount on all studies through March 30th!

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein

“Oh dear Jesus. Please protect us, Lord! “ I heard the women sitting next to me on my flight from New York to Philly shout out for the 10th time. I have to admit, I was getting mildly irritated that she was praying out loud at every bump. We were already so tightly squeezed into the seats of the two-propeller-engine machine that we could hardly move. Yet her generous curves, abundant gesticulation and constant fidgeting, physically forced me to curl up like a little ball almost disappearing in the plane’s window. To my excuse: being German, public display of religious sentiment (ok- of ANY sentiment!) was just too much to deal with.

Mentally, I thus constructed an impenetrable shield of silence around me and retreated into my fantasy world: I had come from Dave deBronkart’s one-day masterpiece on the essence of the e-patient revolution. I was completely captivated by all I had learned at this amazing e-patient boot camp, but in particular, was contemplating the irrefutable case that Dave and the other e-patients had made: All of us are e-patients- periodically, inevitably, eventually.Somehow I was resisting this conclusion. Somehow I was uncomfortable with calling myself an e-patient. This issue had been haunting my mind for a long time to be honest. I was thus determined to fight it out in my head once and for all during this flight!

At the take off at La Guardia, the weather had been rainy and cold. Our tiny plane had bravely fought its way through the clouds though and now a bright sunny day was greeting me as we were approaching Philadelphia. My window seat allowed me to look down at the sunbathed suburbs. I could clearly distinguish the wooden houses, generous driveways, and even the cars below. In my stats-crazed mind, I started to imagine the families living in those houses. “Ok, so there is the average family of four, two parents, with two kids. “ Then I thought: “Oh wait! On average at least one family member will be obese and thus approximately every second house will eventually have one diabetes type 2 patient living in it!” Yes, from this perspective it was thus true, there were patients everywhere. How sad! (And yes, you really do not want me to fly over your house!)

Unfortunately, my neighbor’s intense flight anxiety kept on interfering with my reminiscing when one huge bump ripped me out of my revelry and dropped us down what felt like a good hundred meters. This set off all sort of bells, lights and screams. I dug my fingers deeply into the armrest of the chair and tried to locate my stomach which had slipped down to somewhere around my ankles. Then I caught a deep breath, trying hard to assess just how panicked I should get at this moment. Fortunately, my praying neighbor had moved on to reciting the “Father all mighty” at the top of her voice. “At least one I sort of know”, I thought and gave it a shot. As I was trying to concentrate on simultaneously translating my neighbor’s prayers it to German though, another even rougher drop, followed by a serpentine side-to-side swerve, completely killed my concentration. I stared at the wing outside my window. I had heard a weird noise coming from that direction: I was certain the pilot had tried to get the wheels out but didn’t. This realization was followed by an official announcement via the speakers preparing us for a rather rough landing…

Instinctively, I took the plane’s manual out of the seat pocket in front of me and started reading the instructions. I started preparing myself! “How do you get into the brace position again? Which thing do I have to pull in case I have to open the emergency door?” We were now also flying over water, so I located the floating device and prepared to take my shoes off. …oh and I stuck my iphone in the inner coat pocket, wouldn’t want that to get wet!

Then a third bump made me realize the wheels were now out. I glanced ahead and could see the runway. A wave of relief passed through my entire body! I turned and smiled reassuringly at my exhausted neighbor. I told her everything was going to be fine. That this was simply one of those awful bumpy rides. And sure enough, after the plane had performed a few more, spectacular swerves and the lady next to me a couple of additional “Holy mother Mary” tirades, we finally landed safely. My neighbor and I looked at each other and laughed in relief. She pointed at the manual in my hands: “See, you got scared too!”. She was right, of course!

Back inside the cozy, safe main terminal, I still was shaking my head laughing at the funny and completely different reactions she and I had had faced with what we thought potentially was imminent death. In those moments, we never know how we will react: will our basic survival instincts kick in or will we panic? Will we give our fate up to the greater powers or prepare to put up a fight? Will we speak up and share our fears or curl up in silence? And the answer is: Any combination of those things is possible, depending on the situation, the environment and our personalities.

Boarding my next flight soon thereafter, (This time a huge plane to go back home to Europe), it occurred to me how remarkable Dave’s reactions had been when he was diagnosed with end-stage cancer: He instantly had decided to put up a fight against his bleak-looking odds. All along his struggle with cancer, he had used his fears as force to get prepared, informed and empowered. He focused his anxiety-induced adrenalin rushes to connect with anyone that could help save his life…and it worked!

Since then, Dave has applied his energy and mind to distill for us which factors and behaviors allowed him to survive so that we can do the same should we need to. I had read most of the books and sources Dave cited during the boot camp before, including his own book. Yet watching him present and think through these materials, discuss his insights with a phenomenal audience of equally experienced e-patients like Allison, Akiva, Christine, Grace, Pat, Sarah and Tiffany added a completely new dimension! I am deeply grateful that I had the opportunity to listen and learn from Dave and other equally remarkable e-patients at the event. Edelman sponsored this first US-based event and in my opinion, attending such an e-patient bootcamp with Dave and other e-patients has to become a core requirement of any pharma initiative searching to be patient-focused. Every single thought and insight unexpectedly and permanently opened my mind and shifted my thinking.

The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

As for my internal dilemma with the e-patient label: yes, it is true all those people I watched from my plane are patients too and some will definitely make empowered decisions at times. Yet, does this mean they spend the same time and energy to inform, support and connect patients as all of the e-patients present at the event? Could anyone of them even remotely tell you what it was that empowered them as e-patient Dave managed to crystallize for us so brilliantly during the day? Probably not! It is like in market research, the average patient can tell you what is, but not what will be. I  fear that by generalizing the term e-patient to everyone, it implies that anyone can be a self-proclaimed expert and speaking on e-patients’ behalf without having gone through their unique experience. Dave is not your average patient. He is remarkable. His experience, but in particular, how he turned it into actionable learnings for the future is unique. As Tom Ferguson, the founder of the e-patient movement predicted:

The term e-patients describes individuals who are equipped, enabled, empowered and engaged in their health and health care decisions.

And I would like to add “experienced” to the mix. Listening to Dave during the bootcamp permanently shifted my perspective on the e-patient movement. He was able to do this, because he involuntarily went on a very bumpy ride with cancer, survived and then gave back to the community by sharing his experience. So let me finally put my feelings into words: I am not an e-patient. Not because I’m not a patient. Of course I was and will be in the future, but because I have not been confronted with these same experiences. My plane didn’t crash….yet and hopefully will not! If and when it does though, I know amazing people who I can turn to, that can mentor and support me. If and when I need to, they will be the invaluable instruction manual that I keep in the front pocket of my crazy life …and that will teach me how to fly again as a patient.

In the meantime, I’m definitely “e”: e-traveler, e-mama, e-blogger, e-German…I will do anything in my power to support and further the e-patient movement.

Portuguese is the leading language on twitter after English (see Sysomos study here). Unfortunately, in our geographical benchmark of the followers of 15 pharma accounts,  Brazilian accounts were less present amongst pharma followers than this twitter average; only 5% of followers were from Brazil instead of 9% on twitter overall. Also the accounts present in the sample had a very low number of followers themselves (287 vs. 1,046 overall). In total, pharma’s reach in Brazil was thus very low compared to what could be achieved on twitter.

If we analyze the reach further, it becomes clear that  English speaking countries like US, UK and Canada make up for 88% of the entire pharma twittersphere potential reach. Yet, considering, that the 15 accounts analyzed for this report were exclusively English language accounts, it is actually not surprising that the sample is so strongly skewed towards English. US, Canada and UK are also the countries in which twitter was adopted first. The longer an account is active, the more followers it tends to have. Canadian, US or UK account thus have between 500 and 1,000 followers more than the average! As you will see in our geographical benchmark, the reach of one pharma company versus another is therefore directly correlated with how many US accounts it has amongst its followers.

In the case of Brazil, pharma clearly loses out on followers due to language.

The under-representation of Brazilian accounts amongst pharma followers is thus probably due to language. Many companies are struggling to decide whether and where to create local language accounts. This obviously depends on internal drivers and resources as much as on the opportunity. As a starting point though, we see that Brazil features a large population and acceptable twitter adoption rates. Twitter use in this high growth market will continue to expand quickly. Brazil is a also strategic emerging market for most pharma companies. It is therefore surprising that most do not have a Brazilian twitter presence or emit at least some tweets in Portuguese.

Finally, let us also note the absence of countries like China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. These countries are utterly underrepresented on twitter with respect to their population.  A couple of factors impact this:  a large percentage of the population in these countries do not have access to the internet. In countries like China the government monitors and even blocks twitter use. In other countries, alternative social media platforms exist and are preferred to twitter. However if we look at the big picture of social media evolution, it is clear that pharma cannot ignore these large and dynamic markets from a communication’s perspectives. It has to identify the relevant social media channels to reach these populations. According to this analysis, companies should thus use the Brazilian market as a learning and training ground so that other affiliates can more easily follow this lead. Eventually though, we hope to see twitter accounts, providing local customized content, opening for every pharma affiliate.

Speedy, well-run trials giving birth to break through novel therapies is what we all want. Clinical trials are thus the most crucial collaboration between patients with pharma. When Birgit was asked to participate in a clinical trial for an oral MS treatment, she was quiet positive at first. The therapy sounded promising, the side effects manageable and the objective to further scientific advancement was appealing to her.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm was quickly replaced with doubts. Somehow the information on potential side effects she received from her doctor did not match what other patient were saying online. Somehow she felt she did not completely understand the informed consent and clinical protocol she was asked to sign…and that no one really cared to sit down and sincerely address her doubts. Finally, the burden of participation in terms of costs and time combined with her growing doubts led her to pull out and not participate in the trial.

Birgit’s testimony in the video below is a typical example of the new epatient decision process. Pharma now needs to convince patients of the benefits of their clinical trial, address their doubts  as well as meet their expectations for transparency and support. It indicates a crucial shift in how clinical trials need to be run and communicated in the future.

Birgit Bauer is a true German power woman: independent journalist, social media savvy, Bavarian and patient activist… Oh, and she has MS as well: Fräulein Trulla is how Birgit calls her MS. She blogs about her daily adventures with Fräulein Trulla for Brigitte Woman, my favorite German women magazine!

Please also watch this video interview with Birgit, where she explains why she decided against participating in a clinical trial for an oral MS treatment.

Hi Birgit, could you please briefly tell us who you are, what your patient experience was as well as what you do professionally?

My name is Birgit Bauer and I live right smack in the middle of Bavaria in Germany. My friends say I am a cosmopolitan Bavarian with little leather pants but a lot of laptop! All I can say is that I love my life and that despite my MS I am a happy and fulfilled human being.

I work as a freelance journalist, author as well as social media consultant for small to mid-size companies looking to get the message about their products successfully out into the Web 2.0 world. As a journalist I cover daily news and write special features or columns. This is how I started to blog for Brigitte Woman about my life with MS.

The author in me writes lyric and song texts, while the strategist sets the direction: To live a good life. I have managed to realize this for the past couple of years now, but it wasn’t always easy. MS forced me to completely restructure my life and I had a lot of negative as well as positive experiences whilst at it.

I decided to live my life with MS vs. to let my MS live my life. Clearly, the MS diagnosis in 2005 was a great shock at first, but I turned it into a chance to reorient my private and professional life. Some people walked out of my life, while others walked in. These changes also changed me, so that today, I am a like a colorful bird. I created myself the flexibility to do what I love as well as to be able to deal with my MS when I need to.

Why did you choose to talk about your disease online?

My personal experience has been that MS is often considered a mental disease here in Germany! One time someone yelled at me as if I was deaf and spoke to me in baby talk. That was a very painful experience and showed me how little people know about MS. They do not get enough information about the disease and then do not know how to react to it. Unfortunately, I reacted very aggressively to their ignorance at first. I did not want to be branded as a (mentally) sick person. I did not need anyone’s pity either but wanted empathy.

Many MSers in Germany do not tell anyone that they have the disease, because of the many prejudices against the condition. This is not a healthy situation, because it stresses them and puts additional pressure on their already difficult life with MS. This is why I started to write about MS: to inform people and change their attitude towards MS.

What has been your experience with social media activism so far?

MS in Germany is not sufficiently treated in the media and thus remains a very mysterious disease for most people. A few TV spots sponsored by DMSG (German Multiple Sclerosis Society) here or there are not enough to change the awareness for the disease, esp. in rural areas like the one I live in. Even though more and more people read my blog, as demonstrated by the ever increasing visitor stats, only few leave comments though, out of fear to be outed as an MS patient and publicly talk about their problems. This is very unfortunate, because an open conversation about MS would help to reduce their fears by increasing their knowledge.

What would you like to see from doctors, insurances, government, Pharma as reactions to your online activity?

Doctors: More team work with patients. Openness to all treatment options vs. stubborn insistence on a specific therapy. Readiness to find the common path that optimizes outcomes in a way that is manageable and safe for the patient.

Government and insurers: Transparent and easy solutions that focus on the patient. Participation of patient advocates in decisions so that we can find practical and actionable solutions and that more money flows towards patient care vs. into big administrative machines. Respect of patient rights, flexibility and readiness to include and reimburse all treatment options, also alternative ones.

Administration: Simple ways to speak to competent experts who know what is important to the individual patient. Decision makers cannot just have a theoretic view based on general data, but should have practical training before they get to make decisions that significantly impact the life of others.

Pharma: Drugs that make sense and have manageable side effects, better disease awareness information and support that is neutral and void of promotion. Sensible pricing and lobbying the government only where it makes sense for the patient.

With my blog I want to increase awareness about MS. This is why I chose the biggest German women magazine, Brigitte, to host it. I also want to give courage and a positive outlook to other patients. I experienced myself that an MS diagnosis can feel like the end of everything when you do not get support from all sides to deal with it. I hope that my blog will contribute to this support. I wish that it encourages others to talk to each other about their disease. I would like to receive more support for my blog and activities from other stakeholders, because together we could move a lot of things! I am open to collaboration with anyone who share these goals.

In your opinion, what are the best information sources online for your disease in Europe at the moment? Are there any from Pharma?
What information is missing?

DMSG is THE official MS online source in Germany. It was also my first source of information when I was diagnosed

MSworld (English) often provides useful news

Novartis “MS und ich” aktuell is quiet informative, the rest of the site is more for younger patients

IDW is a scientific news site that also has up to date information on MS

And finally all media outlets as well as, of course, the contact with other online MS patients.

With this post, let us examine the long standing myth that phama on twitter is one big bubble of conversation driven by a few pharma super fans. We examined in great detail the high relevancy of pharma followers in the respective segmentation studies geography and stakeholders here. However let us conduct another quick back of the envelope analysis around the overlap between pharma twittersphere followers. In particular, we would like to analyze whether or not most of the activity generated around pharmaceutical companies on twitter comes from a small elite of “pharma super fans”. In other words, is there a segment of followers within the pharma twittersphere that:

1. Follows most pharmaceutical companies (10 out of 15 pharma accounts)
2. Has an above average reach
3. Tweets above average and
4. Emits most of the retweets and mentions of pharmaceutical companies

Overlap of followers, adjusting for double counting

We identified a total of 115,188 accounts that followed at least one of the 15 pharma accounts benchmarked. Adjusted for double counting, this distilled down to 53,171 unique accounts. There was thus a double count of 54% in the sample. In terms of unique accounts, however, this overlap only translated to 36%, since some accounts followed several pharma accounts. We have no benchmark as to what overlap one should expect between followers of company twitter accounts within a particular industry. We can thus only state here that there is considerably less overlap between followers than it initially appeared.

Follower color coded by number of pharma accounts followed

Above a visualization of all pharma followers with more than 500 followers. Followers are color coded by the number of pharma companies they follow. We see that about two thirds of all accounts (64%) only follow one pharma account on twitter. Only a small number of accounts (3%) followed over 10 of the 15 pharma accounts benchmarked. So can this small number of accounts be qualified as “pharma super fans”?

No. Neither the reach, nor the number of tweets of this group are above the pharma twittersphere average. Also, this segment does not have a significantly different stakeholder mix than the overall sample: only exception pharma employees and companies. They made up 7% of the segment instead of 2% overall.

Next, we examined the activity around pharmaceutical companies in terms of the retweets and mentions they received. We analyzed an estimated 3,163 tweets, resulting in 4,999 retweets and 8,106 mentions between January and September 2011 as a basis. We took a sample of 30% of the retweets and mentions to analyze who emitted them.

Only 56%, of the accounts that retweeted or mentioned the pharma accounts benchmarked actually also followed them. In other words, 44% of accounts that reacted to pharma tweets, or 33% of the total mentions, were from people who did not even follow any of the 15 pharma accounts benchmarked.

While it is true that the segment that followed more than 10 pharma accounts retweeted or mentioned pharma accounts about twice as much on average, the total activity of this segment only represents 14% of all mentions and retweets. The majority of retweets and mentions of pharma thus stems from a large number of stakeholders following none, or only one, pharma account.

Conclusions

It is very tempting to believe in the myth of a “pharma super fan”, a subset of pharma commentators that are actively watching and eagerly commenting on pharma’s every activities. It is the dream of every marketer to create such a “super social media fan club”. Yet only a few companies, like Apple, for example actually succeed. It is, of course,  true  that bubbles of highly active hashtagged conversations exist for all important topics, like around pharma’s social media activities (#hcsm, #hcsmeu. #socpharm), investor discussions (using the $ sign instead of the hashtag), diseases and conferences. Yet, as we just discovered, not a single one of these “pockets” of conversations is dominating pharma followers nor driving its mentions on twitter. It is also true that the pharma companies who engage, like JNJ, Boehringer or Roche will get more mentions in the conversations they chose to engage with. Yet, that is the whole point of engagement, isn’t it? Finally, of course, some segments or pockets of conversation might temporarily dominate discussions, like during conferences for example, or some might even necessitate close monitoring and crisis management. Yet it would be ignorant of the vast complexity of issues and stakeholders in pharma communications in general to think that the pharma twitter prensence for some reason would be dominated by such pockets of conversation.

Make a guess!

We did of course identify the pharma follower who retweeted and mentioned pharma twitter accounts most this year. Just for fun though, tweet your guess to @whydotpharma using the hashtag #pharmasuperfan. The first 5 correct responses will get a 50% discount on any of the twittersphere studies! Merry Christmas!

The fact that thousands of stakeholders chose to follow pharma accounts on twitter deserves our attention. It says that there are people out there genuinely interested in what pharma has to say, that there is media eagerly awaiting to scoop up the newest press release, investors keen to learn more about the pipeline compound, patients looking for support with their treatment, advocacy groups ready to collaborate on disease awareness, health care professionals loyal and open to engage with scientific content about a product.

Twitter is the new answer to your old loyalty and outreach program. It is your free online informed consent giving you access to thousands of high profile target customers.

53, 171 followers now follow pharma on twitter. Their combined potential reach or the sum of their followers, was 55.6 million. Yet, we still don’t seem to be able to measure and size the opportunity. We have learned to compliantly engage in meaningful ways on twitter, yet do not seem to be ready to take the plunge and fully integrate twitter, or social media in general, into our channel mix and organizational processes.

Engagement is a relationship. You have to invest in it constantly and engage consistently for it to work and flourish in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. As we will see in this analysis, despite having a twitter presence, not all companies made the commitment to be engaged on twitter, using it mainly as a one way channel for their press-releases.

The reasons to stay engaged in social media for pharma are, of course, numerous: to improve reputation, inject humanity into the stiff corporate presence, provide support and information to patients and carers; hoping that doing all of this better than your competitors will somehow give you an advantage with your stakeholders.

This made us wonder: Does it really make a difference whether or not you are following people back and how frequent you tweet? Does engagement on twitter impact the quality of your followers? And how? Can we see differences in type and quality of followers by the strategic objectives that pharma companies have set themselves for their presence on twitter… knowing that they cannot control who follows them?

Yes, it does! As the graph above shows, JNJ and Boehringer “beat” Pfizer and Novartis in terms of reach, even though they have less than half of their followers! Through continuous engagement these companies forged themselves a powerful outreach channel. The quality and dedication to the relationships they forged themselves with a highly engaged audience of relevant stakeholders on twitter has payed. Engagement matters.

The mission of the pharmaceutical industry is to improve healthcare and social media, including twitter, holds the power to profoundly change the way that healthcare is delivered.

Social media thus has created unprecedented opportunities to influence awareness, access and adherence to treatment. It provides pharma with the unique chance to demonstrate that it can be open and transparent; with the opportunity to show how much it cares about improving the health of its patients. A pharma company, wishing to use social media to improve patient outcomes, can only do so successfully if it manages to build trust, credibility and collaboration with the online community first.

Above find a table with the potential reach (sum of followers) by disease area of stakeholders following pharma.  It shows that Media, Healthcare professionals, Patient advocacy and Epatients now directly follow pharma news and updates on twitter. The reach of these stakeholder groups is much less relevant though than the fact that twitter provides us with a way to directly engage with them.  Unfortunately, it is also exactly this opportunity to interact that has slowed down twitter’s, and social media’s, adoption in pharma.

The pharmaceutical industry is regulated along stakeholder communications. Yet twitter, unlike regulations, does not usually grant us the knowledge as to exactly which stakeholder was reached with which message. It also makes no provisions for the type of immediate and continuous exchange that social media is based on.

We hope our analysis will facilitate the appreciation and understanding of followers in new ways, not just as numbers in social media audits, but as new channels to existing and new stakeholders; a new communications method necessitating new approaches. Every single follower has to be seen as an opportunity to ask the right questions, as a potential partner to engage in meaningful conversations with, as a way to serve our customers’ needs better.

In conclusion to this first part of the twittersphere benchmark, we learned that with a potential reach of 55.6 mio, and an highly engaged relevant audience, twitter is a promising tool to use alongside traditional communication channels. The quality and engagement of pharma twittersphere followers seems to be much higher than average. We also saw in the benchmark section that some pharma companies are more engaged than others and reap the benefits in terms of the followers they manage to attract.

Yes, it does really seem to make a difference whether or not you are following people back
Yes, how frequently you tweet does matter, as it gives the impulse for further retweets and mentions
Yes, engagement on twitter impacts the size of your followers
Yes, differences in type and quality of followers exist between the different companies as a result of their engagement behavior on twitter.

Not everything that can be counted, counts. Not everything that counts can be counted. – Albert Einstein

Twitter’s explosive growth continues in 2011, reaching 250 million tweets a day and over 100 million active users. This year, twitter has also become the leading social media platform during major global events and crisis: the Arab revolts, Ben Laden’s capture or the Tsunami in Japan, to just name a few. In light of this impressive growth and growing influence, many questions arise as to how to now integrate twitter into our portfolio of available media channels. It appears that twitter within just a few years has matured from  a shiny new tool everyone experimented with to a new mass media outlet. An outlet with its own rules, dynamics and influencers. Most pharma companies have joined twitter by now, looking to profit from its fantastic immediacy and reach.

Despite this presence though, the long-standing perception that pharma’s adoption of social media is lagging behind has become a staple item in every debate on the topic. Somehow the social media adoption of the pharma industry just feels excruciatingly slow. Yet, we have no data to prove this gut feeling nor any clear definition on what constitutes a lag: Is pharma lagging behind twitter statistics in general or in comparison to other industries in particular? Is the lag in terms of joining and establishing a presence on twitter? Or is pharma rather lagging to reap the results of its efforts online in terms of attracting followers or receiving retweets and mentions? Or yet again is it a lag in the ability to interact and engage with stakeholders via twitter?

The aim of this post  is to set the stage for the extensive benchmark we undertook of pharma twitter accounts and its followers (please see below). With a couple of quick “back of the envelope” analyses, we hope to establish some basis for comparison. For the purpose of the following analysis, “lagging” is defined as either having less followers or joining twitter later than the average user on twitter as well as companies in other industry sectors.

Let us start off with some basic comparisons versus the overall twitter population. On average, the 15 companies benchmarked in this report had 7,704 followers. According to a 2010 twitter study by Sysomos,  this puts them into the top 2% of accounts on twitter with more than 1,000 followers. The top three pharma accounts: Pfizer, Novartis and Roche even had more than 10,000 followers,  something only 0.16% of accounts on twitter achieve.  Also all 15 pharma accounts joined twitter before the end of 2009. Seven out of the 15 pharma profiles were even already created in the course of 2008. In comparison, only 5% of the current twitter population was on twitter before January 2009, whilst 44% of users on twitter only created an account in the course of 2010.

So as accounts amongst others on twitter, pharma accounts neither lag in terms of joining twitter nor in attracting followers.

Granted, this comparison across the entire twitter population is too general. Of course we would expect the corporate presence of a top multinational pharmaceutical company to attract more followers that your average account on twitter. Another basis for comparison is thus the Fortune 50 list of companies and their corporate twitter accounts.  The hypothesis is that companies with higher revenues should be better known and thus attract more followers. Logically, if a company’s rank based on its twitter followers is better than its rank based on revenues, it is “more popular” than another company on the list.

Pharma companies Pfizer and JNJ, part of this Fortune 50 list, actually both ranked almost two times better in terms of followers than revenues. So whilst these two companies did not outperform the others in terms of total number of followers, there is no evidence to conclude that they were lagging behind the other Fortune 50 companies either.

As revenues and followers did not correlate as well as expected, Fortune 50 companies were then clustered and compared by industry sector. Consumer facing industries such as Telecommunications,  Automobile, Retail, Computers and Food clearly attracted more followers per company than other sectors. The pharma sector placed itself right in the middle: The average of pharma followers per company was 2-3 less than for consumer facing sectors which included companies like Target, Pepsi or Apple, for example.  Yet, pharma had also 2-3 times more followers than sectors such as Finance, Insurance and Healthcare. Again, there is no clear evidence of a lag here, but rather a larger question of comparability:  Not all industries are created equal. What constitutes a fair comparison? Which industry sectors have, for example, regulatory restrictions that are comparable to pharma or battle similar reputation issues?

Finally, we compared the top 15 twitter accounts of Fortune 50 companies to the 15 pharma twitter accounts as to when they joined twitter.  According to this time line, Pharma did not join twitter later than companies in other industries.  In fact, most companies set up their accounts somewhere in the course of 2009.  A good number of pharma companies was even already present in 2008.

Comparison of 15 pharma twitter accounts vs. 15 leading twitter accounts of Fortune 50 companies

This small comparison is just a snapshot in time and not extensive enough to overturn our deeply rooted intuition that pharma is lagging in its adoption of social media.  There are many important dimensions, that were ignored, such as the fact that the overall twitter population consists largely of private accounts from individuals, which grossly dilutes averages. Or that consumer facing companies usually have a much larger product specific presence on twitter, while we only compared corporate communication presences. Or that pharma still largely limits its uses of social media to communicate traditional content, foregoing, for the most part, direct interactions, promoting products or providing customer support.

Nevertheless, we have to caution each other against across-the-board, discouraging affirmations of our industry’s current state of social media adoption or the lack thereof. Instead we have to open our minds to the possibilities:

Yes, pharma’s regulatory environment is admittedly more difficult than other industries’. This will not change in the foreseeable future, yet as twitter continues to grow and establish itself as a new mass media outlet not using it because of hazy regulations is not a viable option anymore. Also, as the pharma companies benchmarked in this report have demonstrated, successful and safe engagement on twitter is possible even within this strict regulatory environment.

Yes, pharma won’t ever compete with Target or Apple, but even offline, pharma just does not have the constant engagement with its customers around best deals like Target or a devoted fan club like Apple. Again, given pharma’s reputation challenge,  we have to define what realistic, successful and compliant engagement looks like on pharma’s own terms.

As twitter has established itself as a media platform to be reckoned with, we now need careful analysis and meaningful comparisons to ensure that it can be thoughtfully integrated into our overall communication and marketing strategies. If we do this correctly, constantly and consistently, we will be able to fully reap the benefits of the newly emerged pharma twittersphere. Hopefully, this first quick ‘n dirty analysis  made the case that twitter has outgrown its infancy stages and that pharma has now embraced it as a communications tool. Neither lagging nor leading, compared to other industries, but on its own term.

Image of interactive map of 50k+ pharma followers of 15 pharma twitter accounts

In the next chapters, we will explore what is likely the most pertinent benchmark for pharma on twitter: comparing pharma with respect to its own followers. This analysis will inform us how much the pharma specific audience differs from the over twitter population. It will also give us an idea of how much engagement we can expect from pharma followers and start to think about how this compares to traditional mass media channels. We will also explore in great detail how pharma compares in terms of followers, following, tweets and even RTs and mentions within the sample over 50K pharma twitter followers we analyzed.

And we will not stop there: We segmented followers by stakeholder type (Media, HCP, Advocacy, etc.) and measured the reach and the quality of twitter followers for each pharma company on twitter. We also analyzed where in the world these stakeholders were located and what topics they were interested in, including disease areas, of course. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to our news feed below so that we can inform you when the first study is released.

ABOUT THE PHARMA TWITTERSPHERE BENCHMARK

15 pharma twitter accounts included in pharma twittersphere benchmark

This post is the first chapter of probably the most extensive pharma twitter analysis undertaken up to date: a benchmark of 15 pharma twitter accounts and its 50k+ followers! We chose only corporate communication accounts to ensure comparability.  All accounts benchmarked were Global, except for AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim and GSK, where also US accounts were included.

RESEARCH TOPICS COVERED

• Pharma Twitter Overview: How does pharma presence on twitter compare to other industries? To overall twitter followers? To overall population demographics?
• Follower Overlap: To what degree do followers overlap between pharma companies? Which stakeholders follow/interact with pharma most?
• Follower Geography: Where are followers located? Which countries are over/underrepresented?
• Pharma Twitter Account Benchmark: Which companies use twitter to communicate with their stakeholders? How is their engagement evolving?
• Pharma Engagement Benchmark: Twitter Echo: Which stakeholders engage most with pharma content on twitter? (@replies, RTs)

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When he was diagnosed with a rare disease, e-patient Àngel could not find good information nor an online community and support for his condition. In the interview below, Àngel shared with me how the popular US platform “patients-like-me” reached out to him and matched him with a small community of other patients just like him.

Ángel and I have known each other for a long time (esp. if you count in social media years). I met Ángel via twitter, because he and his community ideagoras have been part of #hcsmeu from the start. He is also THE most passionate evangelist in Spain when it comes e-patients and how pharma should engage with them. It came as a total surprise to me though to find out that Angel since his diagnosis with a rare disease has become an active e-patient as well.

Please also watch this video interview with Ángel, where he explains why and how he chose the popular US platform patients like me to connect with other patients

Hi Ángel, could you please briefly tell us who you are, what your patient experience was as well as what you do professionally?

My name is Ángel González, I am an advertising practitioner with 30 years of professional experience. Two years and a half ago I decided to entrepreneur setting up my own company. At that time, I was diagnosed after a DNA analytics with hemochromatosis, a rare disease that if its not detected on time lead to liver cancer.

Why did you choose to talk about your disease online?
I thought that, rather to hide my illness, it was worth doing share my experience as a patient via the Social Web. I had founded sites such as “This I believe” that were really inspiring and pushy to embrace the social conversation.

I strongly believe that social and sharing experiences can be healing. I want to change silent, I want to change stigmas and stereotipes about living and experience an illness. I want to collapse the establishment and politically correct.

What has been your experience with social media activism so far?

Because of my current professional activity, I am putting a great effort and enthusiasm in evangelizing about the reality and benefits of the social web. We do that by talking to audiences of pharma marketers, doctors and patients. From my patient standpoint, I belong to PatientsLikeMe and have my fellows-suffereres of hemochromatosis. We do share how we are facing the illness and have regular convos about experiences.

What would you like to see from doctors, insurances, government, Pharma as reactions to your online activity?

I would like to see them finally understand this reality and embrace it for improving in all counts. It does not matter the status quo, the regulatory environment…the most important issue is to have a positive mindset and be willing to assume risks…as well as successes and joy.

In your opinion, what are the best information sources online for your disease in Europe at the moment? Are there any from Pharma?
What information is missing?

At this moment, I am finding more valuable and trusty sources in online sites placed in the US. And not from Pharma sites in any cases.