If you have Periscope on your phone, you may find yourself doing something and all of a sudden, hear a little whistle that is the sound cue to let you know that someone you follow has gone live. I set up an EyeonFDA Periscope handle quite a while ago, with the idea that it might be fun to interview people at conferences or even Advisory Committee meetings or to film the actual Advisory Committee vote. I haven’t used it yet, but I do have 178 followers!
Back in November I did a check in on how involved pharma was on Periscope (See Upscope! Pharma, Periscope and Some Regulatory Questions). I examined the top 25 companies by sales and found that 10 of them (40%) had developed a Periscope handle. Now instead of just doing a check, I have included them in the data base I started that tracks what pharma is doing in social media across several platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest and now Periscope. Here is what I found about pharma and Periscope use after going back to the top 25 companies.
- There has not been a huge increase in the number of companies – I found 11 of the top 25 pharmas have created Periscope capacity – or 44 percent – not quite half;
- Of those 11, 3 of the companies had multiple Periscope assets, including one that had 5, bringing the total of Pharma-related Periscope handles to 17
- The company that had five is also a company that has multiple Twitter feeds, so it makes sense;
- The number of followers ranged from a low of 1 to a high of 978;
- And this one was a surprise, though it should not have been – it appeared that about half of the Periscope properties were from outside the U.S. – the reason that is not surprising is that of the 294 pharma Twitter feeds I follow, only 128 are U.S. based.
- There was no finding of a Periscope handle for FDA, despite the many Twitter handles FDA has (you can see them all at work here).
So it does not appear that there has been explosive growth in the development of Periscope feeds, there is a continued dabbling by pharma. As for the regulatory issues raised in the November posting, no movement there.
