Using social media as a pharmaceutical company

First published in Pharma Industry, May 2021. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument here was that the regulatory constraint on pharma in social media is narrower than most companies assume: you can talk about almost anything, anywhere, as long as it does not touch your prescription products, and the closed group is the one place where that rule changes. That framing is the reason to read it. Four of its six points carry advice that a reader acting on it today should take to their own functions first, and this note names all four, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled.

Point six treats the closed-group opening, and the manual membership check it rests on, as established, so confirm the current position with your own regulatory function before product content goes into any group. Point five uses the word consent for a name-and-email registration that unlocks access to material; that is how the industry spoke in 2021, it is not a legal reading, and the thing to have your data protection function look at is the mechanism, an access gate paying for a registration, not merely what it is called. Point two proposes influencer collaborations without touching disclosure or labelling, which any such collaboration now has to settle with legal before it starts. Point four proposes reusing material across channels, and where that material has been through medical or regulatory approval, the approval was given for a defined use and not for every later placement.

Two smaller things. The article repeats industry figures whose primary source it does not give, among them the processing-speed claim, the ninety-five against ten percent recall, and the fifty percent video share. And the platform specifics belong to 2021: Twitter has since been renamed X, generative AI has changed the production economics behind the short-video advice, and Facebook was the channel the article worked from, so read the six points as mechanisms and the Facebook detail as the example it chose.

In the autumn of 2020 I stood in a large conference room at Grand Hotell Saltsjöbaden and lectured to a good dozen marketers from various pharmaceutical companies in the room and a handful who had joined over Zoom. All of them are experienced, good at what they do, and had ideas about what they wanted to get out of the two days we had together. So I asked, and put together a list based on the group's answers. The most common question was the one about relevance to the customer, but the question that was still standing when we wrapped up the course, the only one I had not covered satisfactorily, was how you can use social media as a pharmaceutical company to market medicines. So here is an article on exactly that subject. And who am I, then?

My name is Fredrik Holmboe and I work with creating digital strategies for commercial communication within the pharmaceutical and life science industry. The training above was the usual course "Multichannel marketing for pharma marketers" that I run together with Pharma Industry once or twice a year, a course that comes round again at the start of June and is open for registration. I hope to see you there...

But back to what a pharmaceutical company should think about when it goes out onto, and makes use of, social media. What I have in mind above all are platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, and in this article I will focus on Facebook.

Further down in the article I will talk about how prescription medicines can be marketed on Facebook, but first a few obvious examples of other options worth considering when you go out onto social media, options that have an effect:

1. Put your employees forward (employee advocacy / activation)

For most companies it is a challenge to open a channel on Facebook, often with worries about what content should be posted there. My usual answer is that as a pharmaceutical company you can talk about more or less anything, anywhere, as long as it does not touch your prescription medicines. That leaves an enormously large and open field of possibilities to consider, and posts from your employees are one obvious example.

Data from Marketing Charts shows that 7 out of 10 consumers feel a stronger connection to brands whose CEO is active on social media (nicely done on Twitter, Malin Parkler) or where the employees share information about what the company is working on.

In my earlier articles I have brought up examples such as Chewbacca Mom, where Candace Payne showed off the Chewbacca mask she had just bought, a clip that has been viewed millions upon millions of times. That clip is a guaranteed laugh if you watch it on YouTube. The mechanism at work in that case is authenticity, something you can use in your communication too.

People love seeing who the people behind a brand are.

Show who the sales manager is, who the receptionist is, the lab engineer and the project manager. Put your salespeople, your management team and your business developers forward.

So you are the company and you are the brand, and it does not get more authentic than showing who you are, what you stand for, what you struggle with and what you are striving towards.

2. Use relevant influencers on a smaller scale

Something I have been hammering on about for several years now is that pharmaceutical companies ought to spend a great deal more time showing what successes they have beyond the pill. How much is reinvested in research? How many doses of medicine are donated to developing countries? How much is given to charitable organisations? Have you managed to get a B Corp certification, proof that you prioritise goals other than pure profit, the way Chiesi Pharma has?

As you bring those messages forward, look into who the strongest voices are. Perhaps it is one committed individual, perhaps it is several across different areas who together can build the story.

The most important thing to look at is the engagement they get from their followers, not how many followers they have. That is what has paved the way for the trend of using micro-influencers with somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 followers at the low end and up to 50,000 or 100,000 followers at the high end, instead of the really big names, who often have lower engagement.

Use people who already have a voice and an audience, so that the initiatives you carry out, initiatives of such value to society, get better reach.

People feel greater trust in influencers who have a clear grounding in the message, and all of it rests on storytelling and on creating an emotional connection with the recipient.

Again the point is authenticity, but in this case in collaboration with people outside your organisation.

3. Use video

Today it is easier than ever to create video, and whole productions can happen inside our smartphones and go from there onto any platform at all. There are signals saying that 50 percent of marketing today should be video.

So mentioning video in this list goes without saying.

You are certainly running a number of webinars today, and perhaps you are allowed to use the recorded webinar in your marketing afterwards. Sometimes that is not the case, because the presenter does not want their material spread that way. Might it then be possible to pull out a few sequences of 30 seconds to 1 minute each instead? A length that suits social media much better.

Is there scope to create short films that shine a light on a medicine-related question? Without naming the medicine, of course. It gives you a way to show which questions you are focusing on, it builds brand awareness, it fills your channels, and if it is done with a certain measure of humour, with a twinkle in the eye, the chance of it being shared on by others goes up. The mechanism at work then is the reasons we share on social media, which are:

• To share valuable content with others
• To define our personality online
• To create and maintain contacts
• For self-fulfilment
• To support causes and organisations

Because video contains both sound and moving images, and because we are 60,000 times faster at processing visual information, 95 percent of viewers remember the message compared with only 10 percent who get the same message in text. With the level of impression we get from video, it is no wonder that video is the fastest growing format online today.

4. Use the same content in several formats

This was touched on briefly in the previous point, with the example of being allowed to use shorter parts of a webinar in cases where the whole webinar could not be used.

There is a term in digital marketing called content repurposing, which carries several meanings. In part it is about reusing the same content in several channels, which means adapting the material to different formats and lengths. In part it is about going through what content exists that is not being put to use today but that, with some adjustment, has a value for the market. And in part it is about combining existing content into a longer and more extensive article or video, so as to give the recipient more exhaustive information without them having to search it out themselves.

What matters most in reusing content is that it is so-called evergreen content, which means that it has a value and is current today, and that it will have a value in a year, or a couple of years, as well.

When you use the same content in several formats on several different platforms, the key is to take account of each platform's visitors and their expectations of what they are going to experience on that particular platform.

5. Generate consent through social media

In points three and four, video was mentioned, along with how the same content can be used in several formats, one example being short clips to get pithy messages out to the market.

Those short clips can also be used to advertise a lecture or a course, where the interested person gets the chance to register with name and email address and so gain access to the material.

For that to work, the clip needs to lead on to a landing page that is empty of more or less everything making up the frame of an ordinary website, that is the usual header, footer, menu and so on, and contains only information about the lecture or the course plus a form to register with. The only aim of the kind of landing page I am describing here is to act as a target for marketing activities intended to generate leads, hence the absence of distracting objects, not to lead the visitor on to other parts of your website. There are other initiatives that do that far better.

Common examples of material you can gain access to through a registration are:

• Lectures
• Courses
• Exhaustive product descriptions
• Congress reports
• Results from surveys

6. Use closed groups to market prescription medicines

In a closed group where you have manually approved every membership request and made sure the group contains only healthcare professionals, you have the possibility of marketing prescription medicines.

But for the group to be worth both being a member of and actually reading what gets posted in it, which are not infrequently two entirely different things, the content in the group has to amount to a great deal more than product marketing.

Within the concept of inbound marketing, which I often work from when I help companies with their commercial communication whatever the format, we talk about three different steps in a buying process. These also have a distribution between them in terms of how large a share they make up of the total content published:

• Awareness, 60 percent
• Consideration, 30 percent
• Decision, 10 percent

According to the distribution above, which has proved to work very well, it is only in the decision phase, Decision, that you talk about the product's properties and benefits, which then makes up only 10 percent of the total communication.

What these steps mean, what type of content lands where and the psychology behind it is enough for a whole article, but in short it can be said that the greater part of what you create should focus on delighting the recipient and giving them value. When they are happy and feel they have been able to consume valuable information from you, the willingness to receive your product information opens up.

So what can you bring up in a group that fills a feed regularly, and preferably often, without being product-focused?

Some of it we have raised earlier in this article, and as a complement here are a few thought starters:

• Lectures
• Training courses
• Instructional films
• The latest articles from your website
• The best tips within the therapy area
• Panel discussions and studio interviews
• The history of the therapy area
• Events in the group, for example a neurology nurses' conference
• Send in your best Christmas photo with the staff
• Questions (polls) and results
• Congratulations at holidays
• Marking special days, for example MS Day
• External monitoring from, for example, developing countries
• Collecting articles from other press
• Company profiling: goals, vision, positions on current questions, raising debate, staff
• Putting forward the first neurologist who carried out a particular treatment
• Updated treatment recommendations by county council, discussing the differences
• Study results, new studies, graphs presenting results
• The HCP association gets a say
• The patient association gets a say
• Book tips
• The chance to put questions to your medical department

There is a great deal to bring up in a closed group for healthcare professionals on Facebook that is of interest to the members. With some thought, and of course thorough preparation so that you are running ahead of your publishing schedule, I hope that you and your team succeed in creating the best closed group for your target audience.

If you get there and manage to get a small community of your own going, you will probably get away with a few product-focused posts at regular intervals.

In closing

As always, my hope is that this article has been of value to you and that a small seed has been sown that leads to you improving your commercial communication online in some form.

Because it is more important that you do one thing, and do it really well with great value for the recipient, than that you do many things that are all good enough.

Online we are very easy to swap out, and if the communication is not good enough you lose the market's eyes and ears, and over time communication that does not live up to expectations damages a brand.

So if you reading this are a marketing director, CEO or equivalent and have the ability to influence the number of initiatives you run in a year, work to bring the number down and thereby raise the quality of what you create. Among other things there is probably a great deal to do to improve your webinars, if it is the case that you are running ordinary webinars (one camera, one presenter), so that you stand out from the crowd.

Sharper communication reused across several formats is a win for everyone, except possibly the competitor.

All the best,

Fredrik Holmboe

fredrik@dualia.se

The Swedish original is on the publisher's site: Att använda sociala medier som läkemedelsbolag. If you want help turning a thin channel into one worth following, that is what the Content Engine Sprint does.