Pharma companies today can reach cancer patients and physicians more easily than ever thanks to social media—but should they? Yes, but prepare for both pitfalls and positives, say Real Chemistry’s Discern researchers who’ve been studying the space.
While pharma companies can build more direct connections to cancer community members, marketers also need to navigate through the misinformation and overwhelming amount of data on social media.
In the last quarter, there were 132,000 Twitter posts about breast cancer, said Theresa Schmidt, Discern's vice president of health. Using analytics, though, pharma companies can turn reams of data points into patient and HCP insights.
“Companies can use it to figure out what value messaging might resonate best but also to learn what are breast cancer patients’ barriers to treatment, and in general, what are the challenges that cancer patients are dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” she said.
Misinformation is another problem that pharma companies can work to flip. Bad actors abound on social media, whether to push a position or a product, intentionally misleading cancer community members with purposefully bad or just incorrect sources.
As Schmidt noted, social media are not peer-reviewed. By allying with trusted sources—key opinion leaders, patient advocacy groups and associations—the pharma industry can “borrow” trust...
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