Elon Musk’s apparent ongoing campaign to diminish his carefully curated reputation for business acumen through his mismanagement of Twitter has brought a number of damaging repercussions for pharma and healthcare.
The turmoil at Twitter, reflected to a lesser extent in the testing times being experienced by other platforms, is the poster child for the industry’s struggles with social media.
Since pharma use of social media went mainstream more than 15 years ago, first with corporate blogs, then with Twitter and Facebook, the main platforms have provided the industry with its fair share of challenges, but they’ve also remained relatively stable. None has, at least yet, undergone a ‘Myspace moment’ of terminal decline into obscurity. But equally, stability is no longer something that would be associated with Twitter, and the cracks appearing there have other platforms questioning their way forward.
Platform uncertainty
For Twitter, the uncertainty around its future has taken on increasingly concerning tones. Less than a month after buying the social media site for an eye-watering price tag of $44bn in October 2022, Musk’s Twitter stopped enforcing its ban on misleading information about COVID-19.
Despite its previous owners suspending more than 11,000 accounts for spreading dangerous misinformation about the pandemic, Musk decided that even ‘demonstrably false or misleading’ tweets, or those that might ‘lead to significant risk of harm’, no longer had to be removed from his platform.
That marked a line in the sand for some, including Finnish government R&D body the Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). It temporarily, and then permanently, discontinued its official account as a result of the misinformation and conspiracy theories being perpetuated.
THL’s director of communications Marjo Loisa told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper: “90% of tweets related to the coronavirus are highly inappropriate, and people are joining other discussions with disinformation, too. It has been an appealing platform for spreading disinformation from the start. Plenty of links related to [disinformation] are being shared in the discussions.”
Prior to the change in its COVID-19 policy there was enthusiastic backing for staying on Twitter from one high-profile health authority, Dr Robert Califf, commissioner at the US FDA, as he noted in one of a series of tweets that ‘Twitter has tremendous power to help people.’
He added: ‘The easy thing to do would be to abandon using Twitter, but that’s not the right thing for us to do at this time. More than ever before, it’s important that the FDA continues to use Twitter for good and [that we] do everything in our power to protect the public from potential harm.
‘I truly do believe in the power of social media being used for good. We will continue to post accurate health information. We’ll continue to provide accurate information to inform decision- making. We’ll continue being a resource to every consumer needing information about products we regulate.’
Whether the good of using Twitter outweighs the bad is a consideration for all health stakeholders, but for pharma there are additional issues around its commercial impact. The botched rollout of its revamped Twitter Blue verification programme in November 2022 allowed accounts impersonating various corporations to briefly flourish.
An announcement that ‘insulin is free now’ by one fake account claiming to be Lilly’s own channel caused significant share price drops for the pharma company and its fellow insulin makers like Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. (It should also be noted that Lilly has recently reduced its insulin prices by 70%.)
Uncertainty about Twitter’s policies and the nature of speech now allowed on the platform have also seen a drastic fall in the number of companies in pharma and other sectors willing to advertise there. Coming as Musk had been hoping to increase the site’s revenues, the world’s now second-richest man has not seen Twitter Blue subscriptions replace the lost funds from cancelled adverts.
But Twitter is not the only social media site with troubles. Facebook saw its monthly user growth stall for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2021 and, although its user base appears to be increasing again, its revenues declined in the first quarter of last year, apparently due to the war in Ukraine and greater competition from newer channels. One of those is TikTok, which this year is itself facing an emerging – and potentially existential – threat. Government staff in the US and Canada, as well employees at the European Commission, have been banned from using the popular China-owned app over security concerns.
Regulatory confusion
At the same time that the social media landscape itself is experiencing significant headwinds, parts of pharma continue to struggle with the technology, prompting industry bodies to step in. In January the first specific guidance for social media was published by the UK’s PMCPA, following European and international guidance from EFPIA and the IFPMA that emerged last September. In the UK, the guidance covers
the implications of things such as liking posts, employees’ personal use of social media channels, hashtags and the use of links.
Occasional difficulties with these relatively simple concepts haven’t prevented pharma from making expansive use of social media. For all the criticism the industry faces for not embracing new technology, it should be noted that Roche and Novartis were quicker to join Twitter than Coke and Pepsi. Looking just at that platform, it’s not uncommon to find a big pharma company with a corporate Twitter account, regional accounts, local country accounts, presences set up for disease awareness initiatives and perhaps a handful of other accounts.
Generally, that’s been made possible by applying older, existing rules to the more modern technology, but the recent updates of the rules are a clear indication that some of social media’s idiosyncrasies continue to create confusion for some pharma marketers. That notion is backed up by a slow, but steady, number of social media- related code breaches, with the channels’ reach and jurisdictional implications often tripping companies up.
Audience disappointment
A more pervasive problem for pharma is its performance on social media. The channels struggle to meet the expectations of either healthcare professionals (HCPs) or patients, despite being mainstream marketing and communications tools for pharma for over a decade.
When we recently assessed the customer experience (CX) provided to HCPs by social media, its scores in our Customer Experience Quotient (CXQ) research were the worst of any of the activities we measured.
That global survey of 6,270 HCPs was carried out last year and gave social media a ‘fair’ score of 37 out of 100, almost ten points behind the next lowest scoring channels (mobile apps and sponsored information on third-party websites).
The picture is more disappointing still for patients, with those surveyed in Europe and the US giving pharma social media accounts a CXQ score of 28 – perilously close to the lowest possible level of ‘poor’. The survey of 540 patients was carried out in 2021 and it did find some positive common ground with its equivalent HCP research, namely that there is demand for content from pharma to be delivered via social media.
Of patients surveyed, 10% turned to social media for answers from pharma, more than had most recently used email, mobile apps or the telephone when seeking information. But the opportunity is likely bigger still, with a misalignment across all channels – including social media – in terms of those that pharma uses and those patients prefer.
For example, 5% of respondents to our patient survey said they most often interacted with pharma via social media, while 10% said they would prefer to have those kinds of interactions.
HCP channel preferences are similarly not being met. In research we carried out in 2021, surveying 2,000 HCPs in North America and Europe, the level of those that interacted with pharma via social media was negligible, at just 0.3% of interactions. However, 3% of those HCPs said they would like to interact that way.
Social media’s opportunity gap
Pharma has an opportunity to make more effective and wider use of social media. The turmoil at individual platforms aside, the technology and concepts of social media have become ingrained in the ways in which all healthcare stakeholders interact.
The industry’s challenge is to increase its digital maturity so that it can better meet stakeholder needs and provide content in a way that fits with people’s digital lives. To meet this challenge, companies need to measure and respond to the customer experience they provide to different audiences through these channels to understand how to integrate this into their digital assets. Without this type of customer-centric approach to digital channels, pharma will continue to have a social media problem.