Using HCP social media insights healthcare companies can gain an in-depth understanding of their customers to answer key business questions and keep ahead of online trends to inform strategic activities across the year. By realising your HCPs’ concerns you can provide solutions to their unmet needs. Tracking their digital engagement around events or campaigns allows for learning to support marketing planning and strategies for the future.
With the use of social media in healthcare comes a number of risks — the main limitation of health information found on social media being the lack of quality and reliability. Specifically, for HCPs, they have the same legal and ethical obligations to their patients on social media as they would anywhere else, including maintaining confidentiality and anonymity, no matter the intended audience. Furthermore, social media can blur the lines between personal and professional, and it is important for HCPs to maintain that professional boundary not only with their patients but the general public too.
In healthcare, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Sermo, and TikTok are valuable resources allowing doctors, students, and healthcare professionals (HCPs) to connect with both their peers and the general public on a global scale. More and more HCPs are using social media platforms to have open, honest discussions with their peers regarding their experiences with patient cases and various therapies, as well as to voice their needs and opinions.
#MedTwitter is great tool to keep up to date with latest developments in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, to pose questions to fellow HCPs regarding patient cases, to raise an influential voice in the fight against medical misinformation being shared with the public, and to start conversations on various opinions and views of the newest product launches.
The definition of a ‘patient influencer’ and their role within the healthcare industry varies greatly. Generally, a patient influencer is a highly visible and trusted health consumer, who uses social media to share their experiences of living with or caring for someone with a chronic illness. Their goal is to raise awareness of, and help others with their condition. Many patient influencers see themselves as patient advocates, helping others on their health journey, however, their massive online audiences truly make them influencers.
For a list of ways you could engage your DOLs, click here.
At CREATION.co, we’ve led the way in using data science to identify and profile healthcare professional Digital Opinion Leaders (DOLs) since we first introduced the concept in 2012.
Deciding how to identify, profile and engage DOLs is a process as unique as your own goals. So we work with you to define what’s most important in your particular DOL identification and profiling exercise.
Below are 10 questions to ask about your DOLs:
To learn more visit our Digital Opinion Leader Mapping page
At CREATION.co, we believe that this is the wrong type of question to be asking, as an influencer is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ across the pharmaceutical industry. The key influencers that matter to you will be based both on context and strategy, and it is much more important to align yourself with medical influencers, or DOLs, who are the best fit for your business needs and share your overall key business objective.
CREATION Pinpoint® is a software product launched by CREATION.co that gathers in-depth analysis and insights about healthcare professionals, and helps inform digital healthcare personas.
A healthcare persona is a way to help identify how HCPs may think, feel and do when engaging with your healthcare organisation.