So what are people who use social media for health really looking for?
If you put yourself in a health information seekers shoes you can come up with all types of scenarios where people might search for health information. For example:
-Searching for symptoms
-Searching for information on a specific disease state
-Getting ready to see your physician and want to ensure you have updated knowledge to leverage your discussion.
-Wondering about a medications side effects
-Unexplained possible side effect
-Want information on how to deal with a family member who has a serious health condition
So all these types of searches lead to the way people search for health information on the Internet and where they go? I believe they do in a big way.
Like I have said we are in the middle of some quant research to determine both how people search for health information and the credibility of different types of health information available on the Web. The initial data shows that people want credible health information but once they have a good understanding of health issues and disease states they want to hear from others to evaluate their health choices.
A while back I used a social media buzz monitoring service to determine if the level of buzz around Gardasil was really negative and I found that although there was a lot of buzz only 14.5% was negative.
Now back to the
search for health information. The key questions
that DTC marketers want to know about the use of
social media is:
1. Is my target audience using it?
2. Can it be used to leverage business/brand
objectives?
3. Are consumers using social media to make
healthcare decisions?
I believe that the answers to all three are yes
but drug marketers have to do a lot more research
to convince management that social media is a
viable and measurable channel to meet business
needs. We have to know the right questions to ask
rather than just taking statistics at face
value.
