How to maximise your presence at medical meetings with social media

Oct 28






Medical meetings are an incredibly valuable source of information for healthcare professionals (HCPs), and there’s a lot of opportunity for pharma to be building relationships with these audiences around key events. Whether it be an in-person or virtual event, the guidance below will help you to maximise your company’s use of social media during these meetings.
When getting started on how social media can support your presence at a medical meeting, it's important to start with the right content. Pharma and healthcare companies have traditionally put a lot of time and effort into physical booths for medical meetings, but as many events post COVID-19 are operating under a hybrid model of in-person and online attendance, there needs to be adequate thought to the virtual experience for HCPs too.

While virtual booths became popular in 2020, these only started to scratch the surface of what is possible for a digital experience, with a further opportunity untapped to go beyond the content typically found in a congress booth. For example, HCPs have indicated they would like to access virtual case study discussions, training tools, CME, on-demand presentations and videos, and Q&As with faculty1. Social media can be a place where you engage in discussion around the congress, but it can also be a method for supporting a HCP's journey by driving traffic through to web properties where they can access interactive content.  

Below we look at how you can maximise social media presence, the journey to web properties, and how you can make conferences deliver high impact if you have a small budget.

Don't focus all your efforts during the event period only

90% of HCPs said access to information and discussion beyond a meeting helps them to apply new medical approaches more quickly1
HCPs have indicated that they would like to be able to access conference materials all year round, rather than only during the event1. And not only does a longer-view strategy around congress content benefit HCPs, but as scientific meetings are also often held over a short duration it can mean it’s a crowded time to be speaking to your audience with limited opportunity to reach them. Your activity is more likely to be effective if your audience has had more than one interaction with you. A culmination of interactions pre, during and post events can help to build audience awareness of what your company is doing in this space. 

Before the event

During this stage, think about content which builds up to the activity you have planned during the event. For example, content topics that reinforce key things you will present or talk about at the meeting, driving traffic to your web properties or sign-ups for interactive events like LinkedIn live panels or webinars. 

Pro tip: Avoid posting too many teasers if they don't say much, such as 'We're going to be at #ESMO2023 visit us at booth 21'. One of these is plenty! This can be made much more interesting for your audience by:
  • Sharing what you will be discussing, e.g. join us for a chat about how we can achieve better outcomes for patients with metastatic breast cancer. You could post this with a video teasing a few key topics on the current challenges or areas of unmet need.  
  • Share quotes from the staff on the booth about what they are most looking forward to at the event. This can help increase recognition of your staff when clinicians get to the event too.
  • Share a time lapse behind the scenes of the booth build / conference build (if permitted by the conference). 


The key approach here is to raise awareness of your presence but also create content that is interesting and valuable for your audience.

The tweet below from Novo Nordisk is a great example of generating awareness of their presence at an upcoming event but in an engaging way.

During the event

Think about how your company can stand out and cut through the noise during the event. Also consider how you can add value to the online conversation that emerges during the meeting.

Pro tip: Avoid generic photos of your team at a booth or a speaker presenting, endeavor to add more depth to this. What else can you say alongside this image to make it more interesting? Perhaps some key learnings your team took away from the event or session, fascinating topics of discussions, etc.

Stay in touch with the topics being discussed online during the event

During the event, observe what conversations are trending and think about how you could contribute something valuable to these discussions. Have a plan in place to be able to respond to these conversations in real-time. Critical to this is developing scenario planning ahead of time so you have pre-approved responses ready to go. Additionally, you could also consider having a team on stand-by to create new responsive content and get this approved ad hoc.
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Enhance peer-to-peer discussion and referrals

For scientific meetings that have gone virtual (or hybrid), it’s curtailed the networking and peer-to-peer discussions that once happened in the event halls. In your activity, consider how you can help to connect HCPs with their peers beyond geographical boundaries through interactive activities like live panel discussions. It can also be a great tactic for overseas clinicians who are unable to travel for an event.

Leverage expert voices in your company

Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies often have employees with high levels of expertise who can share a unique perspective and are often a more relatable voice than the corporate one. You should also look beyond the company’s senior leadership when considering who to engage in this type of activity. 

After the event

To support clinicians preference to have materials accessible after the meeting, think about how you can follow up with useful information and keep the conversation going beyond the event. A website can be a great place to house information related to the conference, and supporting content around the topics you discuss at the conference. After the event you can use social media to drive people to the site that they can continue to access.

The Novo Nordisk conference hub is a fantastic example of this. 

Summarise key findings from the event

Physicians have indicated that they’d like to see pharma provide more access to findings from medical congresses online1. In a virtual meeting, it can be difficult to navigate around all the sessions on offer. This presents an opportunity for pharma companies to summarise the key findings from the meeting after the event in an easily accessible format for HCPs. Or for HCPs who attended in-person, this also gives them some interesting post-event reading. Here you could also consider engaging your employees to highlight your depth of expertise in the area and surface different perspectives. 

Using paid media along the journey

Set aside some paid budget
If you want to target a specific HCP audience around a congress, organic content will only go so far. Especially if your corporate account has a mixed follower base of various audiences. Use paid media to target your audience specifically. For virtual congresses, consider where attendees would usually travel from to attend the congress in person so that you can target these regions with your ads. And look to target people engaging with the congress hashtags on X (Twitter). For in-person events, you can get very targeted with paid media and look at geo-targeting around the congress venue, as well as congress hashtags and account targeting.
Use paid media to sequence messages 
Many social media platforms can help to facilitate sequenced messaging for your audience via retargeting through paid media. Retargeting will let you target your ads on social media to people who have engaged your content (e.g. watched a video) or visited a website property (where pixel data collection is possible). This will allow you to serve people the next most relevant message in their journey, leading to a more personalised experience with your company. See our Mastering Paid Social Media course for more information on retargeting. 

The online journey for a medical meeting

How does this all come together for an online journey during a medical meeting? Below is an example of how Soda Pharmaceuticals might use social media to enhance their presence at the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) annual meeting in 2023. Soda Pharmaceuticals has new data coming out for a drug for the treatment of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). Below shows how their target audience persona, Mary who is a Consultant Oncologist, might engage with their activity pre, during and post event.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.

Frankly Pharma tips for prioritising event activity on a limited budget

  1. Focus where you get the most impact. If you’ve got a few events in the calendar, use social listening tools to analyse and understand the past conversations and impact of the scientific meetings on online conversation. This could help to consolidate your budget and focus on supporting fewer events that can drive the most impact.
  2. Focus your paid media pre or post event. You will likely find that competition to serve paid media to your audience during the event period will be more costly. When it comes to posting during the event period, utilise more organic posting with congress hashtags.
  3. Repurpose or surface relevant content. Consider what pre-existing assets you have from around the company that could support the topics you want to talk about during the event. Also consider if there is other relevant website content that you could resurface with a new perspective for the upcoming event.

References
1. EPG Health. Scientific meetings in the digital age. 2017
2. SERMO. The digital day of a HCP, May 2019

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