Your guide to pharma social media strategy

May 3


Social media is fast becoming an essential channel to reach and engage healthcare audiences. With HCP social media use on the rise and 3 in 4 patients using recommendations online to inform their medication usage, it’s where every pharma company needs to be active to reach these valuable audiences.

The first step in healthcare social media marketing is to establish your social media strategy. In this guide, we'll give you a run down what goes into a pharma social media strategy and some pointers when briefing an agency to support you. 

Social media and healthcare: the opportunity 

Before we get started it's worth spending a few moments to recap on why, as a pharma marketer or communications specialist, you would consider social media as a key part of your go-to-market strategy.

Social media plays an increasingly important role as a source of information and influence on decision making for patients. A recent study by Ogilvy Research and Intelligence1 showed just how powerful social media content is in the patient journey:
  • Seven in ten people surveyed (70%) either follow/seek out health related social media accounts or learn about health or medical issues from social media accounts
  • 93% of those who engaged with health-related social media accounts reported taking action as a result of seeing health or medical related social media content
  • Over half (54%) scheduled an appointment (e.g. check-up for an issue or preventative screening) after seeing health or medical related social media content.
  • 47% reported that health related social media accounts have made it easier to learn about health conditions
  • 42% indicate they feel more confident in making decisions about their health because of health or medical social media accounts
In the past a lot of health conversations were reserved for closed online groups, such as forums or Facebook groups, but in recent years we've seen a big shift into this taking place in more public settings. Now, much more candid health conversations being shared in public settings across Instagram and TikTok where people have found communities to discuss diagnosis, treatments, and day-to-day life with their health condition. We just need to look at the huge amount of conversation around Ozempic usage on TikTok to see the amount of health advice being shared in this platform.

We also see social media plans an important role for clinician's decision making and behaviour. A recent study from Sermo and LiveWorld2 showed:
  •  57% of US HCPs have changed their perception of a medication as a result of information seen on social media
  • This then lead to changes in prescribing habits for 41% of them
  • 46% of HCP's surveyed follow fellow HCPs and HCP influencers on social media.
  • Only 16% of surveyed HCPs reported that their perceptions have never been influenced by social media
For the younger cohort of doctors in the workforce, they have grown up with social media and it's much more a part of their daily lives than their older colleagues. They expect pharma to provide more personalised and on-demand information that meets them where they are and when the time suits them. It's also been shown that younger clinicians are less likely to engage with pharma through conferences and sales reps, which is why it's so important pharma is providing valuable digital content experiences to reach these doctors. 
“I don’t think they’re that interested in industry,” comments Dr Harry Gibbs, Programme Director, Outpatients Programme, and Deputy Director, General Medicine, The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. He notes that “they can get their [medical] information instantly from elsewhere”, so why should they attend lengthy congresses or sit down with pharma sales reps?3

What to include in your pharma social media strategy

Social media might seem like a spontaneous channel, but you will rarely get the results you are looking for without a good strategy in place. Your social media strategy is likely to be a document that will continue to evolve as you explore opportunities in your organisation. You may start with a fairly high level document, then refine and develop this over time, either working with an internal team or with an agency. A strategy will also serve as a guiding document for any new team members who join your internal team or on your account at your agency.

Below we have outlined the items we'd recommend including in a pharma social media strategy. We haven't gone in to detail about how to develop your strategy, for that we'd recommend our Social Media Strategy & Planning course.  

Objectives
Your social media strategy should start with your objectives. Robust, documented objectives make it crystal clear what you are hoping to achieve. Without clear objectives to guide your strategy it becomes difficult to make decisions in your approach and hard to measure the effectiveness of your activity.

When setting your objectives there are two key principles to adhere to:
  • Ensure your social media objectives ladder up to your overarching business and marketing objectives. If these are disconnected, proving the value of your activities and investment becomes difficult.
  • Ensure your social media objectives include the audience you are targeting, the metrics you are looking to achieve and the target date or timeframe. An example may be "Drive severe psoriasis patients in France to complete the quality of life test, achieving 3,000 tests completed by December 2024."  

Audience
Defining your audience can be done in the form of a persona, which is a fictitious representation of a person in your audience. This helps build a common understanding of who you are targeting and helps you make strategic decisions about your channel choices, tactics and content. 

You may have already done this at a brand level, for your social media strategy you should then supplement this with social media specifics, such as their wants and needs from social media and the channels they are likely to be active on.   

Channels
Your channel planning may either be managed in-house, or may be briefed to a media or social agency to recommend channels that fit your objectives and audience. A critical planning step when deciding on the channels to include is to check internally within your organisation to understand:
  • Are there any channels that are pre-approved for use in marketing campaigns? There may be existing social accounts you can leverage. 
  • Are there any channels that your organisation is not comfortable using? This may result in additional approval hurdles for your campaign so you will know to factor in some extra time.
  • Are there existing learnings that can be brought forward from past social campaigns?
  • Are there internal teams or subject matter experts you should liaise with?


For each channel you are going to include in your plan (such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, reddit, X) outline the purpose of the channel, the audience you will be targeting there, and the focus for the content on this channel. You might also outline the posting cadence if you are developing organic content.

Pharma social media tactics
Tactics are the building blocks of your strategy, they outline the things you will do to help achieve your objectives. During your initial planning stages it's likely that your tactics may only be described at a high level and you may be evaluating several tactics. For each tactic under consideration you could include the social media objective it relates to, the audience insight that is leading you to consider this tactic, the tactic high level description, cost, impact and feasibility. You can see an example of this from the Social Media Strategy & Planning course below.

Social media content
During the strategic planning phase your focus on content is likely to be at a high level only. This might include your strategic content pillars to define the groups of content you'll likely be producing as part of your campaign on an ongoing basis, or an outline of key campaigns that will run, or expected content to come through from global. 

You might also agree on an editorial process for managing content that will be posted from the accounts. Key to remember here, is you may find content fatigues on social media if you run in a paid media campaign (at this point you'd start to see engagement drop). Try to get a wide suite of assets approved by your team up front to allow you to be able to swap out assets without doing new approvals every time.  


Tip: avoid creating your social media content in a vacuum. Understanding what is trending on social media and what type of content (topics and formats) your audience is engaging with will help you to create content that resonates. This is particularly important if you are creating organic content. Ask your agency to provide you with trend reports and social best practice sessions.

“A lot of content I’ve seen from pharma is very corporate in style...You can tell the aim is to tick a marketing box rather than to actually engage people.” - Dr Azmain Chowdhury, MD, NHS,3

Amplification
The next stage of your strategy should outline how you will ensure your content reaches your healthcare target audiences. Just posting organic social media content and hoping for the best will rarely get you the results you desire. Your amplification plans could include a mix of organic tactics, to leverage trends and search optimisation, paid tactics, such your media approach, budget and targeting, or earned tactics, such as viral, PR or influencer led plans. 

Measurement framework
What does good look like? How do we know this activity is working? 
These are common questions we hear in pharma marketing. Outlining a measurement framework and expected targets will help you to be able to answer these questions.  Skip this step and it will always be challenging to prove the return on investment.

Remember too, that not all metrics need to come from social media alone. You might also supplement with research such as analysis of search behaviours, social listening, website performance and market research to show success. If social is part of an integrated channel mix, you'll also want to understand it's impact relevant to others in your mix on your end goal. 

It will also be important to agree on a reporting cadence and how often you will want to review if the activity is working. You may have a range of reporting formats:

  • Executive wrap: top level summary with information that is pertinent to senior leadership. A focus on performance against core business or marketing KPIs and any next actions. 
  • Interval reporting: This is a more detailed report at specific intervals (like mid-campaign or post-campaign) based on your measurement framework. This report may also include additional metrics, outside of core KPIs, that help to understand an overall picture of performance and key learnings that can be applied. This can also focus on optimisation metrics, these may not show your performance against KPIs but can help you make decisions about how you augment and improve the campaign.
  • Campaign dashboard: This can be updated in real-time and can be a source of data for optimisation decisions about your campaign. This is likely to be produced in excel or a data visualisation tool, like Google Data Studio or Power BI. 

Budget
If working with an agency to support on your social media plans you will likely agree on key budget parameters for the activities. If working with internal teams, you will want a clear outline of the resource required to deliver to ensure your plans are feasible. 

A big driver of agency costs can be community management (monitoring and responding to comments and reporting AEs if they arise). If you are looking to save budget, consider if there is an internal resource who can support with this task, freeing up your agency time for strategy, creative, content and media. 

Risk management, governance and adverse event reporting
A key component for using social media in pharmaceutical companies, is a robust risk management and governance plan. This can help give your organisation confidence in embarking on new social media activities or tactics. Check out our mini-course on risk-mitigation to see what is involved at this stage.

It's fantastic being able to have a two-way conversation with your audience on social media. Comments can be a great source of audience and therapy area insight, as well as getting an understanding of whether your activities are resonating and being effective. But in pharma and healthcare, there is a little extra preparation that is needed to do this effectively and compliantly. Our free sample course can give you the know-how to be able to manage this with your organisation or agency. The first step here, is to find out the requirements from your pharmacovigilance/safety team for monitoring adverse events and to ensure all team members from third-parties working on social media activities for your company are appropriately trained. Make sure to get a clear understanding of the monitoring requirements, such as is it 7 days a week or only business days, so that your agency can cost appropriately for this or you can secure the resource needed internally.

Briefing your social media agency 

Providing a thorough, written brief is invaluable to your agency and provides a "north star" to always compare their output against. The key in briefing is to provide the right level of detail upfront, without overwhelming the team with all the technical details. Those details can be provided in attachments and appendices that the more medical agency team members (such as medical writers) can delve in to in detail. It's OK if your brief evolves over time, but it's important to align on any changes in direction in writing with your agency. 

Some of information you would want to share with your agency in the briefing include:
  • Your key goals and objectives
  • Target audience & any existing research
  • Any background context, previous research you have conducted or past campaign performance
  • Any mandatories or no-go areas
  • Key dates and milestones 
  • Existing company social channels that the agency could use
  • Key dates, including approval timelines for MLR review, and budget parameters
  • Preferred output format e.g. PPT with a presentation session

As a briefing process we'd recommend providing the written brief first for your agency to review thoroughly, then conducting a verbal briefing and Q&A session. This helps ensure that your agency can have the right people in the room to ask the right questions and can hit the ground running as soon as you finish the briefing session. If you have an established relationship with your agency, you might also decide to co-write a brief with a strategist from the agency. This can help in reducing time the agency might spend analysing specific components of the brief as you teased this out during the writing process. 

For further briefing guidance and templates, check out our mini course on Working with an agency. 

References:
1.  Ogilvy Research & Intelligence commissioned a CARAVAN survey conducted by Big Village among a sample of 1,008 adults 18 years of age and older. April 2024
2. Survey Finds 57% of U.S. Physicians Have Changed Their Perception of a Medication as a Result of Info on Social Media, Sermo, February 2023
3. Get ready for Gen Z doctors, European Medical Journal, 

Articles we think you'd like

Frankly Speaking: Jethro Marsh

Jethro Marsh is an experienced commercial leader, who most recently has been leading the strategy and solutions division at Roche Diagnostics. We sat down to hear his thoughts on industry challenges and commercial effectiveness.

How to maximise your presence at medical meetings with social media

Whether it be an in-person or virtual event, learn how to enhance your company's presence at a meeting with the use of social media.

How to optimise your content to rank in social search

Search on social media is on the rise. Learn how to optimise your healthcare social media content for social search.

Select a course to start your learning journey

Created with