Thanks for stopping by to leave a comment. We should do some work together.

The analysis you are doing of the pharma Twittersphere is great, and I am very much looking forward to part 2.

I’m predicting that the second part of your analysis will reveal that pharma accounts are currently mostly being followed by pharma employees, the agencies and ancillaries that work with them, pundits and analysts. Perhaps the occasional healthcare professional, but scant numbers, and only those who take an adjacent interest in Health 2.0 which may have little to do with their day job.

What I do not expect to see are scores of people-patients or patient community accounts hanging on pharma’s every word.

From this speculative perspective, pharma’s Twitter activities to date have been an unmitigated failure. If all they want to do is engage the communities they already work with and know, they may as well pick up the phone.

So, we’re back to basics, namely:

Why is pharma using Twitter?
What does it want to achieve?
Which communities is pharma trying to reach?
How is pharma measuring its success, and what is it measuring?
How is it going to adapt its activity in order to improve on the above?
What’s next?

What I have witnessed though, over and over again, that there are little surprises, if you do follow the path of engagement, it shows.

In the next couple of days, I will release analysis on who is following pharma at the moment, by size of their following, segment and how many other pharma accounts they follow… we will see if this hypothesis holds, if pharmaco’s that engage have a different quality of audience than those that don’t.

It seems to me that twitter has been an experiment more than a concrete strategic initiative to engage with x or y stakeholder for most pharmacos so far.

The quality though of the audience you manage to engage with will be the true indicator of pharma’s success on twitter. We all know this, but now we have to make it visible, prove it, make the case. Thanks for this attempt. It is definately one further step in that direction.

As to engaging with new followers…it gets very hard to keep up if you’re getting dozens every day. I’m being forced to ignore the vast majority unless I see immediately that we have mutual interests or they retweet me.