A year and a half after launching a US-based corporate blog Eli Lilly & Company is preparing to allow some of its local operations to join the blogosphere.

Writing on the pharma company's LillyPad blog Greg Kueterman said: “Some of our affiliate businesses in other countries will soon be launching their own versions of LillyPad, and you'll see some posts from those countries right here (as long as it's relevant to our broader audience).

“Conversely, some of our posts in the US will start appearing in overseas editions.”

Lilly, which has been running LillyPad since October 2010, has also given the corporate blog a new look, with a re-designed landing page, new search function and a featured posts section to ensure key content can be effectively highlighted.

Blogging, one of the most time consuming areas of social media, seems to be having something of a resurgence in pharma.

In addition to Lilly's expansion of LillyPad, Boehringer Ingelheim announced its own plans earlier this year to launch its first blog.

The German pharma company's new blog will be called The Future Just Happened and Boehringer's head of online communications John Pugh told PMLiVE in January he was looking to work with a range of guest bloggers, including patients.

The number of pharma company blogs has slowly increase since Johnson & Johnson launched the industry's first, JnJ BTW, in 2007. Now seven of the top ten pharma companies run their own blogs, including GSK (More Than Medicine), AstraZeneca (AZ Health Connections) and Sanofi (Discuss Diabetes).