Social Media adoption by pharma can be difficult to pursue due to the strict rules of engagement set by health regulatory authorities which make it hard to have meaningful discussions with patients and/or healthcare professionals.

If you want to engage with your customers on social Media. It’s important to think about your objectives so you can see how social adds value to them and to your company as a whole.

We can help establish those goals using the Groundswell framework:

1. Listening

Following what’s being said about your brand or your therapeutic area on social media enables you to gain insights from you patients and health care professionals.In order to make the most of social monitoring, you need to collect information that will help you define your marketing strategy and grow your business, here are a few suggestions to help you get started:

Think beyond your handle: By that we mean, that it is interesting to monitor not only your brand names or your products but also variations of them, like key-words related to your therapeutic area or side effects of your drugs. That enables you to be alerted to any impending drug related crises.
Keep an eye on your competitors: Creating a list to see what people are saying about your competitors is very helpful to assess their activities. You can also see how they’re interacting with the patients and the HCPs.
Measure the impact of your Marketing campaigns: make sure you monitor related keywords and hashtags so you can capture all of the conversations about the events.

2. Talking to your patients/HCPS: Social Marketing

This is probably the most common social media tactic employed by organizations probably because it’s the easiest. The tactic’s goal is to get broader brand awareness by starting a conversation with and within your audience members in order to generate critical mass of followers. Without this, it’s almost certain that your initiative will have little impact. You can start that conversation by creating videos or participating into social networks (Facebook or LinkedIn).

3. Energizing Customers: Social Selling

The next tactic focuses on identifying digital key opinion leaders who interact with your brand. Energizing them to create buzz or endorsements around your product, service or company.

Social selling is built upon:

Mapping the relevant stakeholders for your disease area or drug and determine which influencer should be targeted.
Word-to-mouth, is probably the most effective marketing channel and it can be further stimulated by viral marketing and social sharing
Capturing the aspirations of your future ambassadors and link them to your content assets.
Engaging in conversations with them to demonstrate your expertise and relevance.
taking the conversations into different channel ( mail, phone, face to face…) without being pushy.

4. Helping customers: social support

This is the tactic you want to employ if you want to facilitate technical, emotional, medical support within a community of people. Besides supporting patients, this tactic is also a great insight tool: In exchange for sponsorship, pharma companies get useful insights in the need of patients, which allows them to become more patient-centric.

5. Embracing customers: crowdsourcing

The Last tactic is employed if you want your company to foster the collective wisdom, knowledge and ingenuity of your audience to boost your innovation efforts.

The key point of this objective is to set up a platform in which you can collect the various crowdsourcing