Who is Doing What on Twitter?

Earlier this month, I wrote up a posting called “Twitter, Media and Pharma” about the transforming effects of Twitter on media reporting by journalists and consumption by patients.  Some people tweeted out the question – what will Pharma do?  Well, let’s take a peek.

As it turns out, some have done a lot, some have done a little and some have not done anything. Back in February, I mentioned that in addition to the FDA Warning/NOV data base I have been working on (See “Some Digital and Social Media Guidance – FDA Regulation of Pharma Communications in a Digital Era“) I was also putting together a data base that tracked the social media activity of pharma of which I have become aware. By social media activity, I specifically mean Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. By pharma, I mean pharmaceutical companies, biotech and device companies.

I do this for a few reasons.  One, by knowing what everyone is doing, it spells out opportunities.  Two, I think most companies are not actually aware of what other companies are doing in social media.  Three, I’m just that geeky.

Today, I’m going to focus just on Twitter.  Here is a little bit of what I found – bearing in mind this represents only that activity of which I am aware and does not claim to be the complete universe of pharma Twitter activity.  As I become aware of them, they are added to the data base along with a few characteristics, including HGH the primary purpose of the feed.  Here is a bit of what can be observed:

• All in all, have discovered about 227 Twitter feeds being run by 51 companies;
• There are over 770,000 people following these Twitter feeds, which is up by about 50% since last July when that number was closer to 500,000 (this means that more people signed up and that I have added more feeds as I found them);
• About one-third of the company Twitter feeds are updated at least daily while 1 out of 5 appear dormant;
• The overwhelming majority (two-thirds) are “corporate” or general news feeds while only a handful were product-specific;
• For job seekers, there are at least 21 feeds that are involved in recruiting (see below for the link to these);
• The feeds with the highest number of followers were @Pfizer_News (Over 44,000), @Novartis (Over 40,000) and @Roche (Over 32,000);
• Highest KLOUT scores however went to @GSK (87) followed by GEHealthcare (83) and @AstraZeneca (82) – very high scores.

If you are interested, the Eye on FDA Twitterfeed has a Twitter list of these pharma feeds where you can follow just that particular list.  I have also created a list for job seekers that allows you to only follow job postings from pharma and related feeds.  And lastly, there is a list of the FDA Twitter feeds so that you can follow only what FDA is saying.

Happy Tweeting everyone and remember.  Be safe out there.