By Mary Kangley 
In September 2019, CREATION Pinpoint® identified 10,706 healthcare professional (HCP) authored tweets (increasing from 8,287 last month), from 5,405 individual HCPs, mentioning a top 50 pharmaceutical company (according to revenue).
September’s TOP 50 PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES MENTIONED BY HCPS ON TWITTER
| Top 50 rank | Company | Total Mentions | Account mentions | Account retweets | Number of Twitter accounts mentioned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Johnson & Johnson | 1153 | 635 | 85 | 26 |
| 2 | Novartis | 819 | 458 | 44 | 14 |
| 3 | Merck & co | 688 | 318 | 16 | 5 |
| 4 | GSK | 683 | 247 | 17 | 8 |
| 5 | Roche | 592 | 328 | 136 | 12 |
| 6 | Merck KGaA | 559 | 39 | 11 | 7 |
| 7 | Pfizer | 559 | 295 | 42 | 13 |
| 8 | Novo Nordisk | 548 | 314 | 55 | 6 |
| 9 | Sanofi | 516 | 316 | 67 | 18 |
| 10 | Bayer | 482 | 144 | 13 | 14 |
| 11 | AstraZeneca | 475 | 383 | 34 | 8 |
| 12 | Gilead | 394 | 71 | 4 | 1 |
| 13 | Amgen | 347 | 163 | 33 | 11 |
| 14 | Lilly | 318 | 139 | 1 | 1 |
| 15 | Abbott | 263 | 300 | 15 | 4 |
| 16 | Boehringer | 182 | 153 | 14 | 11 |
| 17 | Allergan | 160 | 55 | 0 | 2 |
| 18 | Servier | 146 | 25 | 2 | 2 |
| 19 | Vertex | 140 | 113 | 1 | 1 |
| 20 | AbbVie | 138 | 104 | 20 | 7 |
| 21 | BMS | 133 | 121 | 9 | 3 |
| 22 | Teva | 131 | 82 | 7 | 7 |
| 23 | Takeda | 123 | 46 | 9 | 4 |
| 24 | Biogen | 111 | 83 | 8 | 2 |
| 25 | Fresenius | 77 | 25 | 1 | 5 |
| 26 | Mylan | 62 | 20 | 0 | 1 |
| 27 | Eisai | 46 | 22 | 1 | 4 |
| 28 | Celgene | 42 | 26 | 0 | 3 |
| 29 | Regenero | 37 | 15 | 1 | 1 |
| 30 | Bausch | 31 | 15 | 0 | 3 |
| 31 | Mallinckrodt | 30 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 32 | UCB | 30 | 7 | 1 | 3 |
| 33 | Astellas | 29 | 15 | 2 | 3 |
| 34 | CSL | 26 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 35 | Menarini | 25 | 14 | 0 | 2 |
| 36 | Ipsen | 23 | 9 | 1 | 2 |
| 37 | Daiichi-Sankyo | 21 | 13 | 1 | 2 |
| 38 | Sun | 19 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
| 39 | Otsuka | 16 | 5 | 1 | 2 |
| 40 | Grifols | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 41 | Alexion | 8 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| 42 | Ferring | 8 | 9 | 2 | 2 |
| 43 | Chugai | 5 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| 44 | Sumitomo dainippon | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 45 | Endo | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 46 | Shire | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 47 | Mitsubishi tanabe pharma | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 48 | Stada arzneimittel | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 49 | Jiangsu hengrui | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 50 | Sino | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The five pharmaceutical companies that were mentioned the most were Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Novartis, Merck & Co, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Roche. Merck & Co and Roche are new to the top five list this month.
This month, mentions of J&J were driven by HCPs talking positively about the company’s FDA approvals. The approval of Erleada (apalutamide), Invokana (canagliflozin) and Darzalex (daratumumab) were the most frequently mentioned. These were discussed in CREATION.co’s FDA approval tracker this month. Meanwhile, discussion of the opioid lawsuit, which dominated last month’s HCP conversation about the company, had largely subsided, making up just 5% of HCP pharma posts about J&J in September.
The top three links shared by HCPs when discussing pharmaceutical companies show the variety of information they share on social media. This is in contrast to last month’s top 50 tracker, where the most shared links were three trial result announcements from AstraZeneca’s website.
- An educational page from Roche in Spain informing about Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. Each of the 31 posts were shared from Roche Spain’s corporate account.
- An application page for the GSK IMPACT award. All 26 of these mentions were retweets from The King’s Fund account.
- A Reuters investigation of lawsuits around Merck & Co’s Propecia. It was shared by 24 HCPs.
As they were last month, @AstraZeneca and @Merck were the top two most mentioned corporate Twitter accounts, with 284 and 260 mentions respectively over the 30 day period. @novonordisk followed in volume of mentions by pharma HCPs this month.
AstraZeneca, whilst remaining at the top of this list, received 164 more mentions than last month. Of these, 136 occurred at ESMO 2019 where most notably, AstraZeneca presented the FLAURA trial results for Tagrisso (osimertinib), a metastatic non-small cell lung cancer treatment.
| Company account | HCP account mentions | HCP account retweets |
| @AstraZeneca | 284 | 32 |
| @Merck | 260 | 12 |
| @novonordisk | 213 | 30 |
The most shared tweet, which was from @novonordisk, was a response about their insulin stock in the UK ensuring supply for patients in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Many patients and HCPs engaged and asked questions, many of which @novonordisk answered, confirming their 18 week supply.
HCP mentions of top 50 pharmaceutical companies will be tracked monthly to observe how the rankings change over time. You can keep up to date with this and other pharmaceutical tracking including FDA and EMA drug approvals, within the Tracking section of CREATION Knowledge. For these updates straight to your inbox, you can sign up to our monthly eJournal.
Read last month’s Top 50 Pharma Tracker:
Methodology notes:
- Mentions of companies by HCPs in all languages have been included in this research.
- Full data list contains multiple accounts per company (where found). In some cases, a tweet may mention more than one company account (eg. @abbottnews and @abbottglobal) – this only counts as one company mention but two account mentions.
- Number of accounts listed only include those mentioned by HCPs.
- Johnson & Johnson was included as a whole, encompassing its pharmaceutical subsidiary, Janssen.
- Whilst included in the Top 50 Pharma list according to revenue from 2018, Shire has since been acquired by Takeda and no longer holds a Twitter account.
- Unless otherwise specified, mentions of a company are not limited to its Twitter account(s).
