Hey – It’s TWANK Time Again!

Remember TWANK?  In February 2011 I wrote a posting on Twitter Rankings and Pharma.  Twitter Rank = TWANK.  The ranking provided companies, names of feeds, number of followers and KLOUT score, among other things.

At the time I found 114 Twitter feeds run by 35 different companies.  Returning in August 2011, an updated look and found 154 feeds run by 39 different companies.  In the final week of May 2012, another census of Twitter feeds found just over 200 Twitter feeds being run by 44 companies.

Is the number of pharma Twitter feeds important in and of itself?  Not particularly. While only a few years ago, every time a new pharma company picked up the Twitter gauntlet and began to participate, the news of that would spread quickly.  It was news.  And we have had a plethora of conferences on social media and e-patients for a good long while now, involving lots of people coming to lots of cities to present the back and forth between the reasons to participate and the regulatory reasons why there is push back.  So still today, why even write a posting about pharma and twitter.

Well, a few reasons.  First there are interesting patterns of use that are developing – more on that in the following posting.  Second, while there is a fair representation here of pharma, there are still a significant number for whom the Twitterverse is forbidden territory.  Third, it does provide perspective of what our pharma social media universe is comprise of – who is doing what exactly?  What is successful, what appears not? And last, that despite the great regulatory void on social media by FDA, use – albeit uneven – continues to grow.

• Most tweets on a single feed – Accesspharma – 12,432
• Most feeds – Roche – 28
• Most followers – Pfizer_News – 27,795
• Highest KLOUT score – Novartis at 56

In terms of volume, by this count, it would appear that pharma has sent over 149,000 Tweets to over 493,000 followers (these are not exclusive followers, for example, I follow each of the feeds).  The average KLOUT score for pharma is 26.3.

There are varying degrees of activity.  Many of the feeds are quite active while others have clearly not been employed in a long time.  This raises many questions, among them how well some large companies with multiple feeds actually have infrastructure in place to manage them and even to keep track of them.

Last point, as noted, over 149,000 feeds.  FDA regulatory actions expressed through Warning letters or NOVs aimed at a tweet.  Zero.

Here are jpegs of the data base.  I wanted to provide the whole thing for your upload, but I’m on vacation and fed up with my failed attempts.  Note a red square under KLOUT score indicates that one could not be obtained.  The original is hotlinked back to the feeds, but did not transfer to the jpeg.  If I missed a feed that you know about, please feel free to email it in.  Thanks.