Pharmaceutical Industry and Social Media

One of my previous responsibilities working for a pharmaceutical company was to design and manage our corporate external social media strategy. For someone just out of college and already familiar with the social media space, this was a great opportunity. However, what proved to be very difficult was how exactly a pharmaceutical company could use sites like Facebook for example to engage with patients? The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated, especially in the communications we publish to our external audience. In the U.S. for example, any mention of a pharma product requires a host of fair and balance language about the side effects of the product to accompany that message. This is important information for the patient to know and understand, but how can you have a meaningful engagement with patients on Facebook given these rules and regulations? And, with open commenting on Facebook, how do you handle questions about products, adverse events reported, etc.?

These questions proved too difficult for some to answer and many pharmaceutical companies have left the space all together. And for someone who was just starting to understand the complexity of the industry, I too had the same initial reaction. But staying in the space proved to be more valuable than exiting for a number of reasons. First, it allowed us to make sure our voice was being heard and the right information about the company was being published on these sites. Often times, people create copy-cat pages/fake Twitter handles and post content that is not appropriate and not even accurate. By remaining on Facebook, for example, we were able to protect our brand and work to mitigate any damage false information could do to our image. Second, it was clearly important that we use this space to communicate with consumers because so many people now visit these pages on a daily basis. For example, Facebook announced today that they reached the one billion mark in the number of monthly unique users. That's basically a sixth of the world visiting one website on a monthly period. And third, we learned the value that useful information about our company, that was not product specific, can do to potentially improve the company's reputation.

Whether pharmaceutical companies will remain in the social space in the coming years is hard to predict, but for now, we believe it's critical to be in them.