Pharma Interest in Pinterest

Welcome back everyone!  I hope you all had a great end to the summer season.  While we still have a few technical weeks to go, the back to school, back to work calendar says the fun is over.

As regular readers know, I have been working with a colleague to track pharma social media activity by noting all of the activity of which I am aware in Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.  Each entry is categorized so that it can be tracked as to the platform as well as its purpose – i.e. product specific, disease awareness, corporate, etc. We also track country of origin as well as the activity level, number of followers, etc. All of this is compiled into a Pharma Social Media Database with the help of an intrepid colleague.

There is a good deal of activity in social media by pharma, at least on the face of it, which many people still think is not the case.  I am tracking over 230 Twitter feeds, 121 Facebook pages, 172 YouTube channels, and over 80 Google+ pages (more on that in an upcoming posting).  As always, it is important to note that this is the activity of which I am aware and there is likely activity beyond what I know – so this is only a partial look at pharma social media activity, though I believe we have captured a very large chunk of it.

In addition to the above platforms, also included in the tracking efforts is pharma activity related to Pinterest – the social media platform that allows you to take images and pin them to various categories of boards for others to see and share.  Here are a few highlights of the Pharma Pintrest Profile:

• Number of Pharma Pinterest Pages. While there are 39 Pharma Pinterest pages, not all of them are active.  In fact over one-third (16) are dormant pages where there has been no activity for at least the past year;
• Geography. Of the remaining active 23 or so that are active, slightly less than half of them are from the U.S. while the balance are out of Europe;
• Purpose. The overwhelming majority of pages are corporate or general pages with only about 4 being product-specific and 2 aimed at recruitment;
• Regularity of Activity. Only 3 provide daily updates, but 9 (25%) provide either weekly or daily updates;
• Volume. The highest number of pins was over 4000 and the highest number of followers is 460.

While it does not represent a great deal of activity, for many Pinterest is a platform that many may be surprised as any pharma activity at all, much less two job recruitment efforts.  And while the volume of activity may not be significant, what is perhaps significant is how far pharma has been willing to explore emerging social media platforms even without the long-awaited guidance from FDA.  (BTW, I did not find an FDA presence on Pintrest.)

Next time we take a look at this material, let’s look at Pharma and Google+.  In the meantime, welcome back.