Social media has faced resistance in the pharmaceutical space for 2 reasons; compliance and proving return on investment. While the industry is certainly making strides on the compliance front, many marketers still fight to prove the value of social media. Marketers need to educate business units that social media isn’t necessarily a tool to drive transactional sales. Social media can build brand awareness, and if you benchmark your metrics you can prove a positive return on your marketing investment.
Build Awareness by Enhancing a Traditional Activity
Pharmaphorum recently published a story about Boehringer Ingelheim and their use of social media. They found success through Tweetchats. These tweetchats allowed them to extend roundtable discussions and engagement with KOLs. They pulled together patient advocacy groups, HCPs, and pharma companies. 
The results of this initiative were outstanding. Using the #ChatAFib they saw 35 active contributors during the hour, including healthcare providers, patient advocates, healthcare journalists and pharmaceutical company representatives. They also drove greater awareness around the issues of stroke. They reached over 200,000 twitter accounts and saw engagement through retweeting. Through these tweechats they gained greater visibility amongst patient associations and medical experts. They also gained over 200 new followers from these discussion.
I’m sure you have the lingering compliance voice in the back of your mind. How did they get compliance on board? Well, they involved them from the beginning. They met with compliance and documented a series of “what if” scenarios. What happens if someone mentions a specific product? What happens if someone mentions a side-effect? What happens if misleading medical information is presented? What happens if off-topic discussion is initiated about a company or its products? They then worked with compliance to develop contingency plans. This allowed them to approach this social initiative confident they could control the conversation while still maintaining positive engagement.
Build Awareness By Integrating Social
Social, when integrated with other channels, can own brand share. The Thomas Collective enhanced their MCM tactics through the use of social media. After conducting brand awareness research, Thomas recognized there was opportunity for increased awareness. They developed a social media character and used her in a social media contest. 
Through focused and consistent social media communication, The Thomas Collective increased its Facebook fan base by 666%, it’s liked posts by 4,484%, and shared posts by 15,400%. Because they saw such great success this campaign now extends beyond social media pages and has made its way into all digital programming such as advertising, public relations, event execution, sampling, corporate communication, media buying and promotions.
The brand has attributed social media, along with advertising, to the brand’s awareness growth from 39-55%, outpacing its entire competitive set by well over 10%.
What examples of social media success have you seen in the pharmaceutical space?