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Social media bombards users with memes, cat videos and political squabbles. 

For thousands of women facing an aggressive form of breast cancer, Facebook recently brought another, less common offering: hope. 

“We were having a really, really difficult time finding patients,” said Casey Bales, project manager for triple-negative breast cancer research at the IU School of Medicine. 

She coordinates clinical trials – studies in which patients receive drugs or other treatments to try to understand their effects on health outcomes.

The breast cancer trial, begun in 2014, wasn't going well. Three years into the study, less than 40% of the patients needed were enrolled. 

“The trial was in jeopardy,” Bales said last week.

It was saved in 2017 when Facebook posts from the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer and IU researchers about a trial using genomics – the study of genes and their functions – to find weaknesses in cancer tumors appeared.

Indiana University researchers and the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer used the popular networking website and Instagram to recruit participants for a clinical trial. The first-of-its-kind social media effort jump-started a once-moribund effort that led to a Dec. 13 announcement that doctors say could save the lives of patients with triple-negative breast cancer. 

Recruiting through social media has become an important tool for physicians and medical researchers, who can sometimes have difficulty finding patients with specific forms of diseases they are trying to study. 

In our most recent NEJM Catalyst Insights Council Patient Engagement Survey, “Social Networks to Improve Patient Health,” 99% of respondents acknowledge that social networks are potentially useful in health care delivery, especially for chronic disease management (named by 85% of respondents) and promotion of healthy behaviors such as weight loss, physical activity, and healthy eating (78%).

The NEJM Catalyst Insights Council members surveyed — composed of health care executives, clinical leaders, and clinicians — see significant opportunity to improve health by either building or leveraging existing social networks. The seminal research by the medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis shows the strong linkage of behaviors leading to obesity, smoking, and alcohol use within social networks.

Approximately three-fourths of Insights Council member respondents report their organization uses some type of social network as part of their care delivery initiatives, but 90% say these are not yet mature or only slightly mature.”

Facebook and other social media sites illustrate in everyday life the power of social connectedness and the influences individuals have on one another’s behavior. Historically, care delivery has focused exclusively on individual patients. Awareness is growing that social networks in health care, such as PatientsLikeMe and Connected Living, can help people improve health behaviors. Peer networks can provide information and community to patients who otherwise might struggle alone with a new or existing disease.

Background: Health care conferences present a unique opportunity to network, spark innovation, and disseminate novel information to a large audience, but the dissemination of information typically stays within very specific networks. Social network analysis can be adopted to understand the flow of information between virtual social communities and the role of patients within the network.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine the impact engaged patients bring to health care conference social media information flow and how they expand dissemination and distribution of tweets compared to other health care conference stakeholders such as physicians and researchers.

Methods: From January 2014 through December 2016, 7,644,549 tweets were analyzed from 1672 health care conferences with at least 1000 tweets who had registered in Symplur’s Health Care Hashtag Project from 2014 to 2016. The tweet content was analyzed to create a list of the top 100 influencers by mention from each conference, who were then subsequently categorized by stakeholder group. Multivariate linear regression models were created using stepwise function building to identify factors explaining variability as predictor variables for the model in which conference tweets were taken as the dependent variable.

Results: Inclusion of engaged patients in health care conference social media was low compared to that of physicians and has not significantly changed over the last 3 years. When engaged patient voices are included in health care conferences, they greatly increase information flow as measured by total tweet volume (beta=301.6) compared to physicians (beta=137.3, P<.001), expand propagation of information tweeted during a conference as measured by social media impressions created (beta=1,700,000) compared to physicians (beta=270,000, P<.001), and deepen engagement in the tweet conversation as measured by replies to their tweets (beta=24.4) compared to physicians (beta=5.5, P<.001). Social network analysis of hubs and authorities revealed that patients had statistically significant higher hub scores (mean 8.26×10-4, SD 2.96×10-4) compared to other stakeholder groups’ Twitter accounts (mean 7.19×10-4, SD 3.81×10-4; t273.84=4.302, P<.001).

Conclusions: Although engaged patients are powerful accelerators of information flow, expanders of tweet propagation, and greatly deepen engagement in conversation of tweets on social media of health care conferences compared to physicians, they represent only 1.4% of the stakeholder mix of the top 100 influencers in the conversation. Health care conferences that fail to engage patients in their proceedings may risk limiting their engagement with the public, disseminating scientific information to a narrow community and slowing flow of information across social media channels.

J Med Internet Res 2017;19(8):e280

Further Reading:

• “The Patients Included Movement”

As pharma gets ready to explore social media, perhaps they should first ask patients/consumers if they want to engage pharma companies via social media as new research indicates that social media has a very low confidence among US adults.

The biggest threat to online health seekers is “trust in information”. There are a lot of sites out there that will automatically cookie users and use those cookies to serve up ads which makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Can pharma leverage social media to enable patient conversations? The answer is yes, but legal people need to stay away from coffee to allow someone at pharma to talk with patients and the FDA has to better understand what patients want from pharma companies via social media.

In the course of my research I have learned that nothing is more private than a patients’ health. Using social media to engage pharma companies is a very huge step and pharma has to make sure that the step is worth it by adding value in the patient’s eyes, not marketers.

Social media is NOT the answer for pharma at a time when all social media marketing is tanking with stories of false metrics and extremely low organic reach. Social media is part of DTC marketing, but it’s only a very small part of the pie.

Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide evaluated  how  14 major pharma companies  were  performing  across  six  key  categories:  

1. Social presence: How  many  social  networks  was  the  company  on?   
2. Activity: Was  the  content  kept  fresh  with  regular  updates?
3. Engagement: Were  the  companies    engaging  their  users  and  generating interest?    
4. Social network: How  simple  and  intuitive  was  the   connection  between  social  networks?    
5. Virality: Was  the  content  spread  around   the  social  sphere?
6. Sommunity Size: How  big  was  the  community?

Healthcare social media marketing has evolved significantly over the past decade.

Gone are the days of social media managers posting the same or similar content across one, two, or three social media profiles and calling it a day.

Given the importance of social media in healthcare, the team at Convince & Convert wanted to identify common trends across social media marketing from the top U.S. hospitals.

Our New Healthcare Social Media Research

Convince & Convert reviewed all Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube public posts from January 1 – March 31, 2019, by 54 of the top U.S. hospitals, as determined by bed count and the 2018–19 Best Hospitals Honor Roll.

We used Rival IQ for content aggregation and in-depth competitive analysis of all 54 hospitals’ social media efforts. We gathered insights into how hospitals use private messaging by directly interacting with hospital Facebook pages through Messenger.

We also ranked the Top 20 Hospitals in Social Media based on a ranking score that includes Audience Size, Engagement, Engagement Rate Per Post and Total Posts.

Many pharmaceutical companies have been cautious about their social media presence. However, that’s no surprise given the advertising restrictions and potential minefields of discussing prescription medicine in an uncontrolled environment. This report looks at how 16 companies have embraced social media and the trends that have emerged in the industry over the last five years.

Due to the restrictions imposed upon the industry by the FDA, we found that pharmaceutical companies have split their social media presence into four independent silos (see image).

On Facebook, pharmaceutical companies saw growth from both Corporate pages and Career pages. The high growth of the Careers pages is perhaps an indicator of the low number of total Fans these pages have. As for the Corporate pages, the high growth rate suggests that this silo was a very important channel for pharma brands in 2016.

On Twitter, pharmaceutical companies struggled to increase Follower growth throughout 2016. The Branded portals’ handles were the biggest drivers of Follower growth mostly due to the comparatively low number of Followers. Just like on Facebook, the OTC Brand handles didn’t register any significant growth. This could be due to companies refocusing their efforts in other silos.

Further Reading:

• “PharmaGuy's Social Media Compendium ”; http://bit.ly/pgsoccat

The good news is that pharma is solidly onboard with social media use. The not-as-good news is that most companies still have work to do in understanding their social media audiences, according to the latest Social Check-up by Ogilvy Healthworld, part of Ogilvy CommonHealth.

The group partnered with Pulsar for its third annual review of pharma social media use, with researchers expanding this year from 13 companies to include the 20 largest pharma companies by revenue. They evaluated each one’s corporate social media presence, including the number, type and content theme of posts across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

Boehringer Ingelheim and Novo Nordisk ranked at the top with the highest social media engagement numbers, while Allergan, Teva, Takeda, Gilead and Astellas all ranked pretty closely together among those with the lowest engagement.

However, simply putting out the most content didn’t always equate with better engagement. Eli Lilly, for example, posted the most content by pure number of posts during the 6-month period study, but the Indianapolis drugmaker only ranked slightly above average in engagement.

In general, the average pharma company’s use of social media tracks closely with general business posting rates, the researchers said. Every week, the pharma companies averaged 7 Facebook posts, 26 Tweets, one YouTube video and four Instagram posts.

As far as what those posts contained, Ogilvy CommonHealth found that 29% were about disease awareness, followed by 25% company news, 19% around meetings and events, 13% corporate social responsibility, 8% product and research updates, 2% pharma industry news with the remaining 3% other topics.