PM360 Digital Compendium March 2011

Social Media

Who’s Tweeting: The Relation Between Tweets & Balance Sheets
By Joey Barnes

In November 2010, agency Intouch Solutions launched Tweet Pharm, a free interactive infographic that tracks pharmaceutical companies’ use of Twitter. TweetPharm compiles real-time data from the Twitter accounts of major pharma/biotech (and some medical device) companies into a dashboard and “visualizer.” TweetPharm offers a glimpse of which pharma companies are actively using Twitter at the corporate level and how they compare by (a) number of followers, (b) number of accounts they follow, and (c) total tweets.

What is pharma tweeting about? Because TweetPharm currently does not include niche, brand, disease category, or campaign accounts, it isn’t a surprise that the featured tweets are primarily focused on company information such as earnings, policy statements, products, and philanthropy. In the corporate context, pharma companies are leveraging Twitter as a newsfeed to complement public relations efforts, similar to press release distribution. For the most part, their audience is not the patient, but investors, media, and employees. Since launch, the team behind TweetPharm has been reviewing the data for insights, such as if the quantity of tweets or the age of an account equate to number of followers. What they found may surprise you.

Size Does Matter
When taking a deeper look at the size of the larger accounts defined by their following, @Pfizer_news has almost five times the average number of followers; however, its tweet volume is only slightly above average. The same is true for @Novartis with around three and half times the average number of followers and only double the average quantity of tweets. This lack of trending also applies to @JNJComm which has over four and half times the average quantity of tweets, yet less than two times the average number of followers.

After further analysis, the strongest correlation with statistical relevance was actually the association between the number of followers and the sales revenue of the company. Bottom line? Size matters! In this industry, the size of the company is a good indication that more people are interested in what they have to say. The three pharma company accounts with the largest number of followers— @Pfizer_news, @Novartis, and @Roche_com— all happen to belong in the top five largest pharma companies ranked by revenue.

While TweetPharm only features corporate- level accounts, one could assume the same trending would hold true for specific brands, campaigns, or disease-state level Twitter accounts. A similar trend is found for pharma websites. According to Manhattan Research’s white paper “Reaching Today’s ePharma Consumer,” market events and disease population size often correlate to the amount of traffic a product site receives.

The quality of the website can be measured by visitor length of stay and pages viewed, but reach will always tie back to the population affected. In other words, big pharma companies have many Twitter followers by the same token that big brands treating large disease categories generally have more website traffic.

The 36 active TweetPharm accounts at press time have a total of 102,633 followers and a volume of 10,515 tweets. Even if the number of followers has little to do with how engaged a company is on Twitter, people are interested in what pharma has to say.

Joey Barnes is the Business Development Director at Intouch Solutions. Contact her at joey.barnes@intouchsol.com. If you’re interested in seeing what other nuggets of pharma Twitter data TweetPharm offers, visit www.intouchsol.com/tweetpharm.