The Pharma Challenge!

The online presence of the pharmaceutical industry grows more slowly than that of other sectors as they deal with challenges related to current legislation, which limits the type of content published.
Faced with this challenge, Websays has created a service specially designed for the Pharmaceutical industry: the Social Media Pharma Panel.

In addition to the follow-up and monitoring of brands, products, competitors and the market in general, we create highly segmented panels of professionals or end consumers


What is the Social Media Pharma Panel?

The Social Media Pharma Panel is created by segmenting a set of social media users that we are going to listen to in order to collect conversations on determined topics.
The segmentation of a Social Media Panel is done by defining a type of consumers or professionals from sectors such as Medicine, Pharmacy or Veterinary Medicine. This segmentation has almost infinite possibilities: these users can be segmented by their medical specialty or by demographic characteristics for example.
The conversation generated spontaneously by users on social media (social media, digital media, blogs, forums, etc.) and captured by Websays, allows us to capture the pulse of a colective.

Methodology

We build carefully segmented databases of professionals or consumers active on the Internet.
We obtain highly relevant results from the conversations of these groups and we identify, narrow or segment according to their digital profile:

  • Content generators: Authors
  • Opinion Leaders: Influencers
  • Interaction generators: Shakers
  • Followers

Other methods of segmentation of these panels can be by professional discipline, geolocation, language, gender, interests, tone, topics covered, degree of influence, degree of engagement, etc.

Examples

  • Brand surveillance: It allows detecting whether pharmacists or online sales websites are properly using the brands’ style book and following the brands’ good practices or not.
  • Sales trends: Identify the products or services that are being mentioned the most.
  • Profiling: Allows you to analyse and predict the interests, behaviors and other attributes of the followed profiles.
  • Sentiment: Allows you to analyse sentiment trends towards a certain topic, brand, product, etc.
  • Content creation: Helps to define the most relevant topics and type of communication for this group.
  • Online Barometer: Make rankings of brands, products or services according to their online performance.
  • Influencers: Identify, follow and analyse the effectiveness of the influencers hired or discover potential influencers within the groups of interest of the brand.

Real Case: Listening to a Panel of Doctors specialised in the Respiratory System

Objective

Listen to what doctors specialised in the respiratory system say and be able to segment the listenings by specialty (allergists, pulmonologists, and primary care physicians, in this case), type of mentions, geolocation, tone, degree of influence, engagement, etc.

Result

  • We have a Panel of more than 1,000 professionals in Spain.
  • We listen to the conversations of the 3 professional groups, which represent a monthly volume of 250,000 mentions.
  • We have the historic data of more than 3 million mentions in which we can obtain answers to key questions by topic or by professional group. It allows crossing, for example, any subject, product or pathology with the group, in this case allergists, pulmonologists and primary care physicians.

June volume by medical specialties


In these charts we can see the total volume of mentions of the Panel of respiratory system doctors during June 2020, segmenting the 3 groups identified by the client and their differentiated volume. In addition, it can be compared with the volume of the previous month and identify the reduction in conversation volume due to the summer holidays.

June Ranking – Labs

Pharma Ranking

This chart shows which are the most mentioned labs by the Social Media Pharma Panel (in this case, the selected doctors) and the difference with respect to the previous period.

Ranking 2020 – Products

Inhalers

This chart allows us to know which are the most mentioned products by the Social media Pharma Panel (i.e., the selected doctors).

Word cloud Theme COPD in July

In this case, we have filtered by COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and their different meanings) to know the most used terms by the Social Media Panel of specialists in the respiratory system. This could also be limited to only one of the groups, for example pulmonologists.

Legal Compliance

We comply with the international legislation applicable in each territory regarding general health laws and pharmacovigilance legislation.

For this we can use data anonymization for example, as this is a product designed for the Pharma sector. We are also familiar with pharmacovigilance legislation and all the aspects that are derived. Committing ourselves to immediately notify in case of detecting malpractices related to pharmaceutical products and services.


Pharmacovigilance legislation

Most countries have legislation that prohibits the promotion of prescription drugs to the general public. Laboratories cannot advertise: they can only be limited to informing and clarifying doubts that users have. But, faced with the difficulty of defining where the dissemination of information ends and where advertising begins, many pharmaceutical companies prefer not to dialogue for fear of breaking the law.
On the other hand, the Pharmacovigilance legislation makes laboratories responsible for the content on their social networks and prohibits mentioning the names of drugs or the efficacy of treatments and their effects. This implies that labs, although they cannot control the dissemination of certain comments, have an obligation to veto them in the event that they are comments that violate the law. Therefore, it is highly recommended that the online presence of pharmaceutical labs be accompanied by constant monitoring of their corporate channels.