To the next 5000
07.02.14
Twitter is a social media platform ideal for engaging with healthcare stakeholders, patients, media and the public. Here at EFPIA, we recognise the value of being on Twitter, as a means to start and follow conversations on different issues. Obviously, the more people following you, the wider the audience – and the greater the opportunity for dynamic engagement and productive conversations.
Having reached 5,000 Twitter followers this week, EFPIA is happy to celebrate this milestone with you and share some insights on how we got here. In early 2013, we started monitoring web statistics and using social media tools that help reach a bigger number of followers. Why so concerned with numbers? We knew that our presence on Twitter was pointless unless we were engaging with other users – and that required gaining followers, as well as following others.
Through Twitter, we have been able to participate in the promotion of important health days, like this past Wednesday’s #WorldCancerDay. We have had the opportunity to actively engage – in live time – in conversation with persons participating in our events, as we did earlier this month via #EFPIALIVE. We have used the platform to share blogs, press releases, statements, stats, infographics, facts, interesting articles, and the occasional completely silly inane fact – just for fun. Finally, we have used Twitter not always actively, but sometimes just sat back and “listened” to the Twitter chatter, receiving valuable insights from researchers, patient groups, and the general public, among others. End result? We learned a lot, engaged more actively, and had the opportunity for more open conversation with healthcare stakeholders and the public at large.
How We Made the Most of Our Twitter Presence
We started by trying to figure out where we stood. Klout is a tool that measures your social media influence and more specifically on Twitter by retweets, mentions, list memberships, followers and replies, giving you a score between 1-100.
EFPIA’s Klout Score
The Kred index is a similar tool which strongly focuses on how frequently you are retweeted, replied to, mentioned and followed on Twitter. These measurements are then translated into a Kred Influence Score of 1 to 1,000. The higher the score, the more influential you are in both cases.
EFPIA’s Kred Score
Bio Tagcloud is a tool we are using to discover our community’s #interests. This information is crucial to creating personalised and effective engagement with much broader audiences that just our followers.
- Pharma Industry, Health, healthcare, European, medical, technology, research, innovation, life, media, leading, digital, development, information, patients, opinions, views, policy, pharmacy, data, global – to name just a few.
“Many of those who are most successful in social media engagement have started small, and learned through engagement over years of experience” says Daniel Ghinn, CEO at Creation Healthcare (producers of the world’s first social media monitoring tool dedicated to conversations between doctors).
We couldn’t agree more. In the last year we have doubled our Twitter audience – all these tools definitely helped. Yet nothing compares to diligence combined with a good dose of determination – and believing you can reach your target. Here is to seeing you all online soon. Next stop 10,000.
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(photo credits)
