“Every Pharma Social Page, All In One Place.” That is the goal of the newly launched Snow Social Finder from patient engagement agency, Snow Companies. This new tool is built to list all public patient-facing pages and profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that represent the official presence of a biopharmaceutical product. The team at Snow Companies also plans to add pharma brands with a presence on other social platforms in the future.
“This was something that my team and I have been wanting to create for quite some time as pharma has been growing their footprint in social media,” explains Phil Storer, Senior Vice President for Digital at Snow Companies. “We tend to hear from our clients when they are going to take the plunge for the first time that they often don’t quite have a good sense for what it is that they could or should be doing in social. This tool will encourage them get into the space by allowing them to find brands that are somewhat analogous to theirs so they can see what is already being done and not have to worry about being the first kid in the pool.”
For example, companies can currently use the filters on the Snow Social Finder to find brand pages that have comments open on Facebook, pages with brands that have boxed warnings, pages with brands that are running paid ads, dictate a range for an indication’s patient population and/or the number of followers on Facebook, or any combination in order to find a brand like theirs with the tools on social that they would like to use. Currently, Snow’s proprietary digital tracker shows 127 brand pages on Facebook with 40 of those brands also having an Instagram property, 25 also having a YouTube page, and 19 also having a Twitter account. Additionally, 30% of the brands have boxed warnings, 23% of the Facebook pages have comments turned on, and 54% include some kind of presence by real patients. (All quantitative data as of Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 1 AM EST).
Snow Companies also plans to add additional features and channels in which patients engage as the landscape evolves.
“Real patients and their stories are our sweet spot, and we are interested in seeing the correlation between the use of real patients and the activity and the engagement with the page itself,” Storer explains. “Right now, influencer marketing in pharma is in its infancy. However, we know that influencer marketing is going to be growing through 2020 and a tool like this will help us to track and see where that activity is happening.”
The agency has already been able to spot an upward trajectory in social media use through their work on the tool as over 60% of all the pharma-branded Facebook pages on the Snow Social Finder were created between 2017 and 2019. While Snow’s research team will continue to add new brand accounts in order to keep the tool up to date, a crowdsourcing feature will also allow anyone to suggest brand pages that should be added or removed if they are no longer active.
“As the global leaders in patient engagement, we’re always looking around the corner for what’s next,” Storer says. “And it’s clear that social isn’t what’s next—it’s what’s here today. Social is where patients engage and we think that we can engage with patients in the social space in ways that we were unable to do in the past. And as a patient engagement company, we want to be the leaders in this space, and we think that the introduction of this tool establishes us there.”
Snow Companies plans to present the social tracker and discuss digital patient engagement at this year’s eyeforpharma conference that will take place on April 15th and 16th in Philadelphia.
