By Mary Kangley 
Discover what healthcare professionals (HCPs) think about pharmaceutical products and their manufacturers, as it happens, through CREATION.co’s tracking updates.
How are HCPs responding to drug launch news? How are HCPs talking about or engaging with the Top 50 pharmaceutical companies on social media? Each week CREATION.co’s tracking updates bring you the latest insights from the conversation of HCPs across the globe discussing these topics and more.
In August 2019, CREATION Pinpoint® identified 8,289 healthcare professional (HCP) authored tweets, from 4,200 individual HCPs, mentioning a top 50 pharmaceutical company (according to revenue).
August’s top 50 pharmaceutical companies mentioned by HCPs on Twitter
| Top 50 rank | Company | Total Mentions | Account mentions | Account retweets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Johnson & Johnson | 1816 | 107 | 255 |
| 2 | AstraZeneca | 705 | 120 | 164 |
| 3 | Novartis | 697 | 89 | 131 |
| 4 | Bayer | 636 | 43 | 121 |
| 5 | GSK | 577 | 93 | 99 |
| 6 | Merck & co | 554 | 88 | 147 |
| 7 | Roche | 495 | 45 | 99 |
| 8 | Pfizer | 480 | 96 | 108 |
| 9 | Sanofi | 435 | 45 | 149 |
| 10 | Lilly | 363 | 165 | 52 |
| 11 | Gilead | 358 | 32 | 38 |
| 12 | Merck KGaA | 311 | 2 | 13 |
| 13 | Novo Nordisk | 247 | 35 | 69 |
| 14 | Allergan | 214 | 35 | 33 |
| 15 | Amgen | 183 | 21 | 51 |
| 16 | Regenero | 178 | 23 | 46 |
| 17 | AbbVie | 171 | 30 | 46 |
| 18 | Abbott | 142 | 19 | 85 |
| 19 | Teva | 126 | 24 | 9 |
| 20 | Mylan | 90 | 5 | 9 |
| 21 | Takeda | 86 | 18 | 31 |
| 22 | Boehringer | 81 | 7 | 42 |
| 23 | Celgene | 66 | 8 | 15 |
| 24 | Vertex | 66 | 21 | 46 |
| 25 | Bausch | 58 | 10 | 20 |
| 26 | BMS | 54 | 27 | 31 |
| 27 | Eisa | 39 | 2 | 1 |
| 28 | Mallinckrodt | 30 | 13 | 2 |
| 29 | Sun | 30 | 2 | 1 |
| 30 | CSL | 26 | 1 | 0 |
| 31 | Biogen | 25 | 2 | 15 |
| 32 | UCB | 23 | 0 | 6 |
| 33 | Astellas | 20 | 4 | 11 |
| 34 | Servier | 17 | 3 | 3 |
| 35 | Daiichi-Sankyo | 14 | 1 | 8 |
| 36 | Otsuka | 14 | 0 | 2 |
| 37 | Alexion | 13 | 0 | 1 |
| 38 | Ipsen | 13 | 1 | 9 |
| 39 | Ferring | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 40 | Grifols | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| 41 | Menarini | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 42 | Shire | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 43 | Sumitomo dainippon | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 44 | Chugai | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 45 | Endo | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 46 | Fresenius | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 47 | Jiangsu hengrui | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 48 | Mitsubishi tanabe pharma | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 49 | Sino | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 50 | Stada arzneimittel | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The five pharmaceutical companies that were mentioned the most were Johnson & Johnson (J&J), AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
The majority of J&J’s mentions were referring to the opioid crisis and a related lawsuit (906 mentions). J&J’s pharmaceutical subsidiary, Janssen, was mentioned 265 times by HCPs.
The top three links shared by HCPs when discussing pharmaceutical companies were all announcements from AstraZeneca’s website:
- Farxiga meeting its primary endpoint in Phase III DAPA-HF trial.
- Tagrisso significantly improving overall survival in Phase III FLAURA trial.
- Anifrolumab meeting its primary endpoint in Phase III trial.
These press releases were circulated in a total of 257 tweets, of which 197 were retweets from individual HCPs, rather than corporate or organisation accounts.
@AstraZeneca was also the most mentioned Twitter account by HCPs. HCPs posted about AstraZeneca and related news 705 times, but only 23% of their mentions were retweets of AstraZeneca’s own content (164 posts). This suggests that HCP posts about the company are not being driven by its own social media activity. Again, of these 705 mentions of the company, @AstraZeneca was only tagged 17% of the time (120 mentions).
Merck & Co and Lilly followed AstraZeneca as the most mentioned (individual) corporate accounts.
HCP mentions of company Twitter accounts
| Company account | Account mentions | Account retweets |
| @astrazeneca | 120 | 164 |
| @merck | 79 | 137 |
| @lillypad | 159 | 51 |
The @merck original content that HCPs retweeted contained educational information with a link to the Merck & Co website. The most popular of these posts was about the measles virus, which was retweeted 34 times from HCPs globally.
We will continue tracking HCP mentions of top 50 pharmaceutical companies online, so keep your eyes peeled to discover if another company enters the top three! You can keep up to date with this and other pharmaceutical tracking updates, including drug approvals, within the Tracking section of CREATION Knowledge, or sign up to receive monthly updates on all our HCP insights.
Methodology notes:
- Mentions of companies by HCPs in all languages have been included in this research.
- Mentions of a company include the company’s name and Twitter accounts.
- Full data list includes mentions of multiple accounts per company.
- 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.
