How Many Followers on Twitter?

A quick look at pharma and healthcare twitter accounts reveals that the number of followers is measured by hundreds up to a few thousands of followers for any pharma account at corporate level.

For example, Pfizer has about 5,800 followers and Johnson & Johnson 3,400 followers.

It might seem as big numbers, but when you take into consideration that followers can be patients, physicians, investors or simply the general public, the number of followers for each type of stakeholder is relatively small. If, for example, you could measure how many followers are actual patients from the US, probably it would appear as relatively low numbers.

There is a relation between twitter content and the numbers of actual followers. One of the accounts that I like to follow myself is provided by Roche. Here the followers recieve not only PR releases, but also posts directing to interesting articles, and there is a clear effort to use twitter to actively communicate with the following community.

Gilad Karni

Patients Can Talk Back With Sidewiki

Sidewiki is a feature on Google's toolbar that allows anyone to comment on pages as they surf the web. As a social media tool, Sidewiki allows other surfers to read these comments.

What does this mean for medical sites?

It means that patients and physicans alike can leave comments on branded sites with no pharma control. Consumers can report adverse events. Physicians can have on-line on-site discussions of off label use.

It is not clear yet how the industry will handle the situation. Benjamin Curtis of PharmExec reports ways to block the Sidewiki service. However, he adds that Google can probably work around them. This is going to be an interesting subject to follow...





Gilad Karni