Eli Lilly restarts 'limited' Twitter posting and advertising, continues to assess social media strategy

Eli Lilly’s self-imposed exile from Twitter is now over. Six months after the fake account furor drove it from the site, the Big Pharma has begun to tentatively reengage with the platform, resuming limited posting and advertising on its renamed corporate account while continuing to evaluate its strategy.

Lilly stopped posting on Twitter in November after becoming the lighting rod for controversy about the new approach to account verification that the social media site implemented in the wake of the takeover by Elon Musk. By paying Twitter, a user was able to create an account with a blue tick, a marker originally reserved for genuine, notable people and organizations, and post from the handle @EliLillyandCo. 

The message tweeted from the account—“we are excited to announced insulin is free now”—sent Lilly’s share price down 6%. Within days, news emerged that Lilly was halting all ad campaigns on Twitter and pausing its publishing plan for all corporate accounts. Lilly’s Twitter account, @LillyPad, fell silent.

Lilly ended its exile at the start of May with two tweets, one to reveal it has changed its Twitter handle from @LillyPad to @EliLillyandCo so it is “easier to find,” and another to promote its pricing of insulin at $35 or less a month. Since then, Lilly has gone back into its shell and made no further posts.

Asked by Fierce Pharma about the changes, a spokesperson for Lilly told Fierce Pharma Marketing that the company has “restarted limited posting and advertising to our corporate Twitter account as we continue to assess our social media engagement strategy.” The spokesperson added that “Lilly remains committed to ensuring that our patients and customers receive accurate information about our company and our medicines.” 

Lilly changed its handle to @EliLillyandCo, the name used by the free insulin prankster, some time between March 26 and April 29, per the Internet Archive. In the transition to the new handle, Lilly has deleted the post it made in response to the fake tweet, in which it apologized “to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account.” The @LillyPad account is now retired and empty.

Further details of how Lilly is revising its social media strategy are yet to emerge. Lilly’s current public-facing social media guidelines are almost identical to the version that was live on March 8, 2021, the most recent publicly available archived copy. The main change is the addition of a paragraph about how healthcare professionals in the U.S. can access information.