Introduction: Digital marketing enables marketers to gain a better understanding of consumer needs. In terms of digital maturity, the pharmaceutical industry lags behind other regulated industries, such as banking and insurance, despite the fact that consumers spend more and more time on digital media.
Aim: Our purpose was to generate recommendations for the successful management of online social network profiles, to evaluate the consistency and efficiency of pharmaceutical companies in implementing these recommendations and to identify common topics amongst posts with the highest engagement on pharmaceutical online social network profiles.
Methodology: We carried out a computer-mediated discourse analysis (348 posts) on the blogs of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn including the blogs of their partner companies Sprout social and Buffer between 31. 7. 2019 and 1. 2. 2020. We generated recommendations on how to successfully manage an online social network profile based on the analysis. This was followed by a computer-mediated discourse analysis of 10 pharmaceutical company's profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We obtained the data through a manual review of posts and profiles and with the use of the Fanpage karma and Facebook performance quadrant report software. Text and other forms of computer-mediated communication were encoded with the use of the QDA Miner Lite and Microsoft Excel software.
Results: Based on the results of the blogs review we identified 25 recommendations on how to successfully manage an online social network profile. The category with the highest frequency of recommendations was the Graphic elements category (42,2 %). The most regularly implemented recommendation was the recommendation about adding logos to videos (83,2 %), while the least frequently implemented one was the recommendation about the usage of stories (0 %). We determined the average engagement rate on pharmaceutical online social network profiles which were 0.056% for Facebook, 0.026% for Twitter, and 0.051% for LinkedIn. Celebrating holidays and international days was the most common topic of the most successful posts on pharmaceutical online social network profiles.
Conclusion: Pharmaceutical companies aren't implementing recommendations on effective management of online social network profiles consistently. The average engagement rate on pharmaceutical online social network profiles is still lower compared to other industries.
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