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Pharmaceutical and health care companies have been understandably cautious about using social media for marketing purposes.
Pharmaceutical and health care companies have been understandably cautious about using social media for marketing purposes.While the FDA provides little concrete guidance, some social media marketing is permissible.
Here are a few tips and best practices to consider if your health care company is embarking on a Facebook presence.
1. Is Your Product Consumer-Facing?
Determine if your brand, drug or service is “consumer facing” — whether consumers are the ones making the purchase decisions. This factor applies more to over-the-counter products that consumers can buy themselves (such as Advil) in stores and less to prescription drugs for which doctors are the ones writing the prescriptions. Consumers tend to go online to research products before they buy — and they want to be able to reach the manufacturers directly. Physicians, on the other hand, don’t (and can’t legally) talk about work on Facebook. So, pharma advertisers should determine if social media marketing is even relevant to their product in the first place.
2. Provide Useful Information
People go to Facebook to socialize, not to “friend” Lipitor. If pharma companies are to earn the attention of any modern consumer, they should provide useful information and value to the consumers instead of asking them to do things or give personal information. “Information” includes accurate details about the product, including side effects and risks.
3. Ask Intelligent and Related Questions
Once consumers voluntarily give their attention and visit the pharma companies’ Facebook pages, then pharma has the right to ask intelligent questions and listen to the feedback from the community. Instead of telling, asking and listening is a way to earn the dialogue with consumers and fans.
4. Have Real Experts Lead Discussions (Not Marketing or PR Reps)
Consumers are very savvy and have learned to sniff out marketing and “bad acting.” When they interact with advertisers, they expect complete transparency and candor. This goes for pharma as well. So instead of having marketing or PR representatives field questions from users, it’s important for pharma companies to have real experts (scientists, MDs, etc.) answer questions and concerns from consumers. If your company doesn’t currently do this, organizational processes should be put in place to enable it.
5. Create a Publishing Schedule
Many brands have made forays into social media. But beyond just buying display ads on Facebook, it is important to have something new to talk about periodically. This not only means creating valuable content and providing information about new products, but it also can be asking the right questions. The key is to do this consistently and regularly, thus creating a publishing schedule of both content and questions that can be delivered through your Facebook page. This way, users have an expectation for new content on a regular schedule, which will bring them back to the page and give them a reason to talk and share.
6. Establish the Right Success Metrics
“Doing social media” does not mean placing display ads on social media sites like Facebook. You need to engage and measure success to see what works. But the number of fans or Likes are not the best success metrics. Consumer engagement and vibrance of the community are more important and yield more value over time. So for those pharma companies that are using Facebook for marketing, tips two through five above will collectively enable you to better engage the community and create longer-term ties. Metrics that involve actual actions of the users — the number of conversations, the number of repeat visits, the pages viewed per visit — are better than one-off actions like clicking the “like” button.
7. Make a Social Media Commitment (Not a Campaign)
Social media is media created by the conversations of people. Advertisers have to earn the right to participate in these conversations by creating a community with valuable content. What your followers say — whether good or bad — is now permanently recorded online for all to see. So advertisers should be prepared to make a “social media commitment” instead of a “social media campaign.” The efforts in social media should not stop as if it’s a marketing campaign. As advertisers embark on social media “commitments,” they should see them as the opportunity to create relationships and assets of lasting value, both for consumers and pharmaceutical companies.
8. Monitor For Adverse Events
Finally, for the pharmaceutical industry in particular, advertisers must monitor for adverse events in the sites and pages they own and control — including their own Facebook pages. This has seemed an onerous task in the past, but monitoring tools and services are making it easier to collect, detect and act. In addition, there are four criteria that must be met to constitute a reportable event.
The FDA requires that four criteria be reported in each adverse event report:
- 1. Who is the patient affected?
- 2. Who reported the event?
- 3. What was the adverse event?
- 4. What was the product that is suspected of causing the bad reaction?
Most comments on social media sites do not meet all four criteria. So companies should use the tools to gather relevant, potentially reportable comments and have their own medical and legal departments review and provide guidance.
Conclusion
The use of social media is not only appropriate, but also highly effective and efficient in certain cases. So pharma and health care companies should make plans and take specific steps to leverage social media on platforms like Facebook.
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