26-28 - Thought Leader

All superheroes have a telling weakness and how they wield their powers is often a laser edge between salvation and disaster; a well-intentioned but misguided blast can derail a rescue act and leave a trail of issues.

Social media is healthcare’s new superhero, full of high-flying promise and an armoury of positive patient and HCP connectivity, working to combat the obstacles standing in the way of improved patient outcomes.

Its stage is expanding, with an ever-increasing number of search engines and platforms – from TikTok and Instagram to LinkedIn and Reddit – as the big tech players look to embed themselves as part of healthcare’s infrastructure.

The pharmaceutical industry’s current mission is to learn how to use these fresh powers without blowing up established engagement channels or falling foul of regulators. It is a comic book narrative with critical outcomes.

“There are positives and negatives, of course, which we’ve seen play out as health content on social media has exploded over the last five to ten years. But it has opened opportunities that simply didn’t exist before,” says Emma Robertson, Associate Director, Social Media at Langland. “Social creates new connections for both patients and HCPs. For patient communities, it can lead to friendships, knowledge-sharing and the exchange of experiences. Having a rare disease could traditionally be an isolating experience, for example. Social media changes that.

“It also opens up a broader forum for scientific education, with information now accessible that may previously have stayed behind closed doors. It’s transformed medical education. And while better education and awareness for patients and HCPs is an enormous benefit, there’s also a commercial advantage for pharma companies, where social media can help support business objectives. Yet despite its widespread use, it has often been under-recognised as a priority channel.”

Research has shown sharp rises in the number of people turning to social media – and increasingly AI chatbots – for a spectrum of healthcare information while the World Health Organization cautions about the spread of misinformation, stating: ‘Misinformation online has the potential to travel further, faster and sometimes deeper than the truth – on some social media platforms, falsehoods are 70% more likely to get shared than accurate news.’1

“The flip side of the gains we’ve made is that social media is broadly unregulated. It’s a channel where anyone can voice an opinion or make a statement and present it as fact, without needing to prove their credentials, which stands in sharp contrast to the standards expected in pharma,” adds Emma, whose Langland team has deployed successful social media campaigns across areas including mental health, dementia and vaccination. “It often feels like climbing Everest to dispel some of the misinformation and disinformation, but creative and well-thought campaigns have cut through and improve patient outcomes.”

She advocates a consistent social media approach rather than bursts of activity and for pharma to partner with patient communities, online ambassadors and influential figures to create disease-centred strongholds.

“Pharma is right to be cautious and feel its way into social media – the idea of a healthcare influencer is a newer concept in our industry than others – but these channels are where the public goes for information and they cannot be ignored,” observes Emma. “They are becoming the No. 1 sources and they are, in a way, the new television. Ignoring them removes you from the conversation.

“As social media specialists, our challenge is to find a balance between business objectives and finding routes that work. It is not about creating a company TikTok account but more about looking at an ambassador programme with scientific experts posting about frequently asked questions in a therapy area. It could be running advisory boards with health creators to understand what type of content works to promote understanding and better fight misinformation.

“I would like to see more companies moving from short bursts of activity to developing a consistent cadence of partnership and activity throughout the year rather than big spikes for a month with a few posts across the rest of the year.

Ongoing content, such as updates from your partnerships with patient activity groups, HCPs and ambassador feedback, or from looking at search results across TikTok, Google or in large language models, allows you to develop content to answer questions and concerns and better respond to needs.”

Emma comments: “Ultimately, everyone benefits from stronger scientific communications on social media. It raises standards, dampens misinformation and creates an environment for your communications to have impact.”

Emma’s Social Media team at Langland is continuously iterating and piloting the channels and formats to connect with the audiences its campaigns need to reach. From working with travel influencers to connect with highly engaged, but previously uninformed, audiences in campaigns recognised at major industry awards, to arranging Facebook Live events – which, as Emma acknowledges “might now be considered almost archaic”, but can reach hand-picked demographics – working with social media means evolving daily. Influence comes from spotting gaps in understanding and helping people find the information they’re looking for.

“Social media allows us to anticipate what needs to be addressed so that people get the right information at the right time,” adds Emma. “It also helps us reach beyond the patient to their families and carers who also need good information.

“Being involved at this level helps you understand where needs aren’t being met from the patient experiences in their own words and this helps you better prepare HCPs to have conversations in language that resonates. It doesn’t mean you have to be in every single conversation, but it enables you to be in the right ones with the right people.

“We’re seeing a significant shift towards credible, engaging scientific content being available every day on social media. Some of this content is competing with the most viral entertainment-driven content on social platforms, which gives me a lot of hope.
“I am also noticing a really big change in the conversations I’m having with clients to the point that social media and creator partnerships are now being seen as must-haves as opposed to nice-to-haves.”

Sian Ediss-Johnson, Head of Health Influence, Havas Lynx, believes social media is rewiring healthcare communications to a more natural, conversational dynamic that offers huge benefits in patient and HCP engagement.

“Trust travels through people, not media or channels, and social media kind of blew the doors off for the pharma industry because it created a space where people can discuss their health freely online and gain advice from reputable sources,” she says. “People like to have a back and forth. They like to test and learn and figure things out for themselves, whereas many pharma brands have tended to have a broadcast relationship with their patients and HCPs.

“Social media helps patients become advocates for their own health and have richer, fuller dialogue with doctors during their appointments. It is also being used by physicians to unpack evidence, data and knowledge in a peer-to-peer sense and then put those learnings into daily practice.
“It has become a great enabler.”

Regulatory concerns are often used as a device to marginalise social media from the main thrust of campaigns, but Sian comments: “We have to be cautious and aware of regulatory frameworks. Over the last ten years at Havas Lynx, we have trained our teams in pharmacovigilance across different territories and markets, and have strong compliance protocols that enable us to use social media to its full potential.

“There is a discipline to getting all departments on board so that medical and scientific teams can see the capabilities and have confidence in them. In the past, we came across stumbling blocks where medical and legal teams were not onboarded early enough and that delayed campaigns, which was a shame. That attitude is changing as examples continue to prove the strength of social media.

“Having open, transparent conversations from the start goes a very long way, and that’s something we do with every single campaign that comes through our door now. We get all the stakeholders together and talk it through: as an agency we’ll be challenged and the client will too, but ultimately we get to a point where everybody is on board and knows exactly what we need to do to make the campaign happen in a really safe, compliant way.”

Havas Lynx is a serial award winner for its innovative social media campaigns and Sian highlights a strategy it developed uniting a small community impacted by a faulty breast cancer gene. “The gene is passed on genetically and is very rare, so we worked with the client to bring together patients, patient advocates, patient groups and doctors from around the globe to raise awareness around genetic testing.

“It was such an inspiring opportunity to make connections across the globe, and social media was the enabler. The campaign lived across TikTok and Meta where we shared lovely, emotionally resonant content to target everyday people to have conversations and request testing. It resulted in an uptick in requests for genetic testing and the 11-15% engagement rates significantly outperformed pharma benchmarks, confirming that trusted voices are key to breaking down health barriers.

“It was an example of paid advertising and health influence coming together. The paid advertising helped us find the people with the faulty gene faster and then we could get the message seen by the right people and help make a difference to their lives and health.”

Sian believes these types of positive results can help suppress the ‘dark forces’ of mis- and dis-information. She comments: “They can spread like wildfire, so it’s up to us to ensure that the reputable and the expert voices cut through. I think social media channels know they have a responsibility to enable that. For example, doctors can become verified on Reddit, and LinkedIn is developing something similar. X is a cornerstone for HCP discussion as seen in the #CardioX community’s continued success. However, for healthcare brands to fully invest in this channel, the platform must match this professional engagement with equally robust brand safety controls.

“We are working with a lot of clinician creators that are part of a group combatting misinformation and developing trusted healthcare content that helps patients differentiate between good and bad content. Social media is a goldmine of clinical insights, so we have a duty to use it well.”

She adds: “The magic really happens in the community-focused element of social media where people have open conversations and knowledge is shared. The brands that are really going to succeed in the future are the ones that are driving those communities and having conversations with patients and HCPs alike.”

Reference
1. https://www.who.int/teams/digital-health-and-innovation/
digital-channels/combatting-misinformation-online

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