Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim and Roche are the most mature pharmas on social media, though there are still areas in which the companies can do better.
That’s according to a new report by Ogilvy Health. For the first time since 2020, the healthcare agency giant has ranked and reported on how well, or not, pharmas are using social media.
For the report, Social Check-Up 2023, the Ogilvy team assessed the social media use of 10 pharma companies based on their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn streams between the summer of 2021 and the summer of 2022.
Those 10 pharmas: AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck & Co., Novartis, Pfizer, UCB and Roche, were ranked and scored out of a possible perfect score of 30. The report said that its ranking is “not about improvements in the number of followers, but about what companies have done to nurture and engage with communities.”
U.S. Big Pharma Bristol Myers Squibb came out on top with a score of 20.6. It was a close second for Germany’s midsized pharma Boehringer with an impressive score of 20.3. In at third was oncology major Roche with a score of 19.5.
Those scores are based on six areas Ogilvy believes are key in assessing these companies’ social media use, namely: social corporate identity (SCI); social content strategy (SCS); social experience and design (SED); paid social (PS); social influence (SI); and social community (SC), each with a scoring weight of five points in total.
BMS had by the far the best social content strategy with a score of 4.3 (the next highest score was just 3, achieved by both Pfizer and GSK) while Boehringer, which has for more than a decade sunk a lot of time and money into its digital and social media work, had the best social corporate identity, with a score of 3.8, much higher than BMS’ score of 2.8.
Boehringer also topped social experience and design, with a score of 3.5, though third-placed Roche won out on paid social, with an impressive score of 4.2, and also came out on top in social community with a score of 4.
Gilead had a poor showing overall, coming in last with a total score of 13.1 and scoring a zero on social community.
But the report’s authors note that “while the top three companies were mature in most categories, it’s important to note that there weren’t clear leaders across the board.”
It points out that even BMS “had room for improvement” when it came to its corporate identity and paid social work, while Roche ranked lower for social experience and design and for social influence in corporate identity and paid social.
It also notes that Gilead came in joint third in the social experience and design category, but, along with UCB (which was ninth), was “less mature” in other categories including corporate identity, hence its last-place finish.