Using Twitter in the Pharmaceutical and MedicalDevice Industries

Twitter can be a great place to offer “customer service”-type responses to FAQs on even on the spot questions. Problem is: are there  HIPAA violations in disclosing certain types of questions on Twitter?

Engagement (especially with stakeholders) is an area where much of Pharma’s current efforts have been focused. In the case of consumers, engaging in a conversation with consumers while being aware of regulatory constraints.

There is a great site to use to see what people in Pharma are tweeting about. It can be quirky, but it does provide value (when it works).

Pharma and MDI companies appear to be trying to do what social media does – target select audiences with specific messaging – or what has been called by people in the industry, “niche-casting”.  These areas seem to include: geography, product, recruitment, CSR and philanthropy, disease specific, and advocacy.

Some examples of this are:

• Tweetchats to accompany live webinars or speaking events. Viewers can send in their questions via Twitter through a #hashtag, and the moderator will respond both on the webinar and raply back to the question with the same #hashtag. This is also a great way to sound byte out the webinar or discussion for those who cannot be in attendance, but can search not he #hashtag later
• Broadcasting of new blog posts, web pages, trade show attendance, industry news, new hires, and company philanthropic endeavors
• Listening to audience (passively) by searching on key phrases and industry #hashtags to understand what their audience is talking about. It is also a great way to listen to real time conversations about your brand.
• Social validation is also a big use of Twitter. By saving up positive tweets that you have received in the “favorites: Twitter function, you can direct these comments to people right on our Twitter page
• Human to human connection for questions and concerns regarding brand, product, service, support, etc.
• Links to landing pages on your website, blog, LinkedIn, You Tube or other social media channels. The key here is that the landing page provides a call to action to capture lead info.
• Twitter is a great testing arena for messages in upcoming email promotions and presentations, by tweeting out several different options and determining which version of the message resonated the most with your audience.
• Tweeting to encourage subscribing to email lists
• As a vehicle to incorporate keywords in your SEO efforts. This helps search engines understand your core areas of expertise
• Understanding what are the pain points and areas top of mind in your audience. While mainly B2C focused,  Twitter’s local trending topics can provide interesting insight into what your area is talking about right now.
• With a behavior based marketing automation system you can send personalized Twitter messages to leads to provide information that can move them through the sales cycle faster and reduce the length of the cycle
• Retaining existing customers is important to the long-term health of your business. Sometimes though unhappy customers won’t directly communicate their problems. Use Twitter Search to monitor terms related to your business to help spot unhappy customers and solve their problems.
• Many journalists use Twitter. Use JournalistTweets.com to find journalists in your industry on Twitter. Instead of sending them worthless pitch emails, begin to build a relationship with these journalists on Twitter to gain media coverage.

Twitter has some of the best application programing interfaces (APIs) on the web and data on the service is public to all users by default. This makes it easy to pullout valuable information. Use a Twitter client like Hootsuite to monitor keywords about your competitors and gather information about them.