Why should Twitter care about healthcare, other than the obvious reason that it’s a $3 trillion industry just in the U.S.?
Because consumers care about the kind of influence, support and resources that social media can uncover, according to Craig Hashi, one of two Twitter engineers dedicated to healthcare.
Speaking Sunday at the Cleveland Clinic’s sixth annual Patient Experience: Empathy + Innovation Summit, Hashi cited some interesting statistics from a variety of sources. Some 40 percent of consumers believe that information they found on social media affects how they deal with their health, he said. A quarter of Internet users with chronic illnesses look for people with similar health issues. And 42 percent search online for reviews of health products, treatments and providers.
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The volume of information available on Twitter is staggering, Hashi said. There are half a billion tweets send every day. There will be more words on Twitter in the next two years than in all books ever printed. An analysis Hashi put together found that there were 44 million cancer-related tweets in the 12 months ending in March 2015, and traffic spiked in October, which happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
The combination of social media and mobility are changing how people consume information, and healthcare marketers should take notice, Hashi said.
TV is still the most popular media platform, representing about 38 percent of content consumption, according to Hashi, but families spend a lot of time looking at other screens — computers, tablets, smartphones — while the TV is on.
“We’re seeing this dynamic change happen on Twitter as well,” Hashi said. People tweet while watching the tube. “This dynamic thing between TV and Twitter is real.”
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To wit: When the Ken Burns-produced “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” first aired on PBS March 31-April 1, Twitter counted 63,500 live tweets with the hashtag #CancerFilm during the broadcasts. March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament, produced 25.1 million tweets while games were in progress, with 9.1 billion impressions, Hashi said.
A 2013 study that Hashi cited found that U.S. smartphone owners each unlock their phones 110 times per day. “That seems low,” Hashi said. Yet, advertisers spend a lot more on print and a lot less on mobile than consumer usage would suggest.
He gave some examples of great marketing opportunities for healthcare companies.
Twitter processes 23,000 weekly tweets with the words “feet hurt,” and the frequency naturally increases as the day and the work week go on, though many people tweet that when they get home on Saturday night as well. “Dr. Scholl’s can actually come in and reach these people,” Hashi suggested.
“Allergy” tweets mostly occur between March and June, Hashi said. “Sunscreen” also peaks in the late spring and summer. “Uncomfortable tummies” is highest on Thanksgiving, with lesser spikes at Christmas and on Super Bowl Sunday. Hashi said that Tums advertised on Twitter around Thanksgiving.
It may not be enough just to pay attention to tweet volume, however. “There’s a shift on consumption behavior” on Twitter, Hashi said. In the last 18 months, users have added more rich media than ever before, including photos and videos. “You can supplement 140 characters with 1,000 words,” Hashi said.
More data he mentioned included a report that 197 million Americans — about 60 percent of the total population — watched online video in August 2014. And, according to digital marketing firm Invodo, 66 percent who watch product videos say that they feel more confident about making purchases. It would behoove healthcare marketers pay attention.
Pharma companies are the “slowest of the slow” when it comes to changing their marketing strategy because they are so heavily regulated, Hashi said. But some are catching on quickly to the trend of online video; Hashi noted that Novartis and AstraZeneca in particular have reached out on social media more in the last 18 months. (This month, a longtime expert in pharma social media, Craig DeLarge, joined Takeda Pharmaceutical as the head of digital acceleration for emerging markets, with a focus on China, South Korea, Russia and Brazil.)
New apps such as Periscope and Meerkat that let people stream live video through their Twitter accounts, could change the market again. For example, Hashi said that a healthcare advertiser could share interesting content from a conference around the world in real time. “We haven’t seen a healthcare advertiser use this yet,” he said. But it’s probably coming
