Pros of patient community on social media
Pros
● Bring the campaign to life!
A patient community helps to bring a campaign to life. By regularly sharing content your target audience responds to, the campaign becomes tangible and reaches people organically.
● Source of information for a community manager
AA social community is an exciting source of information about the target group. What is going on within the target group? What kind of content do the community members engage most? All these things are very relevant for a community manager when creating and optimising content.
● Community members can interact
By starting a social community, you open a channel where the target group can interact with each other, for example, about a particular disease and everything that comes with it. Where patients from your target group may not yet have been able to get in touch with each other, here is a place where they can.
● Empower patients
The informative content about a disease helps patients understand their condition. This help patients make a better decision to cure it.
Cons
● Good webcare is essential but takes time, attention and expertise
A social community requires proactive content publishing and webcare. This takes time, attention, and, therefore, budget. It is crucial that the quality of the shared content and webcare is high. You do not want typos or other kinds of errors in the comments of a large organisation. Social media users will consider it and approach the company with less seriousness. Effectively, you must ensure that the webcare is run by a qualitatively good team or external agency. Also you want the content you share to be of value.
● Advance protocol setup for adverse events could be challenging
When opening a community, you also open a channel where possible adverse events can be reported. This may seem scary, but measures can be taken in advance with a solid protocol explicitly developed for the campaign.
● Not always the right tool
Setting up and managing a social community is time-consuming, so it must be worth it. Keep your goal in mind at all times. Do you want to build a community, or do you just want to generate website traffic? If you only want to get traffic to a campaign website and do not want to publish organic content, an advertising campaign using dark posts may be compelling enough. Therefore, be sure to consider this carefully!
Cons of patient community on social media
● Good webcare is essential but takes time, attention and expertise
A social community requires proactive content publishing and webcare. This takes time, attention, and, therefore, budget. It is crucial that the quality of the shared content and webcare is high. You do not want typos or other kinds of errors in the comments of a large organisation. Social media users will consider it and approach the company with less seriousness. Effectively, you must ensure that the webcare is run by a qualitatively good team or external agency. Also you want the content you share to be of value.
● Advance protocol setup for adverse events could be challenging
When opening a community, you also open a channel where possible adverse events can be reported. This may seem scary, but measures can be taken in advance with a solid protocol explicitly developed for the campaign.
● Not always the right tool
Setting up and managing a social community is time-consuming, so it must be worth it. Keep your goal in mind at all times. Do you want to build a community, or do you just want to generate website traffic? If you only want to get traffic to a campaign website and do not want to publish organic content, an advertising campaign using dark posts may be compelling enough. Therefore, be sure to consider this carefully!
Adverse event protocol for the patient community
An important success factor in patient community management is a clear, comprehensive, well-used webcare and adverse events protocol (AE). A protocol is a document that describes how AE monitoring will be performed, by who and what actions will be taken in case an AE is being mentioned. Also, what information does the pharmacovigilance department need?
A webcare protocol describes how to deal with the comments on the social media channels of a company. For example, what is the response time? And how are comments from a patient community responded to? An explicit protocol makes it clear to the community manager and any external party (such as an online marketing agency) what their roles are in certain situations. In this way, a Life Sciences & Healthcare organisation can gain control over its social media community AE and thus gain a grip on its reputation.
