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Listen up! Social listening in healthcare

A healthcare professional in scrubs and a hairnet checks their smartphone in a hospital corridor, possibly engaging in some quick social listening amidst the bustle.

Have you been noticing your social media habits grow over the past couple of years? Well, you’re not alone! Online conversations produce enormous amounts of data—globally in 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost six billion in 2027. 

Physicians are also a large part of these online engagements. They are using social media more than ever before to share, connect, and learn from their peers and innovative healthcare businesses. In 2022, +220K new members joined Sermo’s platform, and time on site increased 58% YoY1.

By “listening” to real-time conversations based on specific keywords and phrases, regions, and/or personas, you can gain a more holistic view of what’s happening within your target customers’ psyche and business landscape. Insights from these online conversations help your brand to understand what the market REALLY thinks about your products. 

Advances in artificial intelligence, coupled with the growth in online engagement, first-party data, and primary research, have evolved social listening into a core input necessary for making rapid and informed decisions about your target physicians.  

This offers businesses a rare opportunity to create timely performance reports of their current content and overall strategic goals so they know where and when to launch strategies that will intercept HCPs and offer content they value today and will value tomorrow.  

How social listening is leveraged in healthcare: 

  • Industry trends: a holistic view of your specific segment and the trending topics your audience is engaged with.  
  • Competitive intelligence: insights into competitors and their performance or popularity. 
  • Treatment insights: interpret how physicians perceive different treatments, their preferences, and how they rate different drugs.
  • HCP online influencer profiling: glimpse your online personas and what their motivations are. 

Sermo physicians are bucking the 90-9-1 rule 

Unlike the traditional 90-9-1 rule of general social media content contribution—where 1% of users are creators, 9% engage and 90% simply consume the content—physicians are creating, posting, and engaging with content at a much higher rate. 6 in 10 physicians post or share content on social media frequently / occasionally2.

With our social intelligence platform—turnkey and always-on—marketers can analyze the past two years of Sermo conversations. But we don’t stop there, we also report on public data via news sites, newsletters, blogs, forums, social media platforms, podcasts, and more. That’s +150M sources! 

Check out our new Social Listening Whitepaper for a step-by-step guide to social listening and the benefits this strategy can offer to help you understand what your customers are saying, thinking, and feeling. 

On behalf of Sermo, thank you for checking out our blog post on Social Listening. This is just one of the many examples of engagement opportunities and insights available with Sermo. 

At Sermo, we turn physician experience, expertise and observations into actionable insights for the global healthcare community. Engaging with more than 1 million HCPs across 150 countries, we provide physicians with a social platform that fosters impactful peer-to-peer collaboration & discussions about issues that are important to them and their patients. Sermo offers on-demand access to physicians via a suite of proprietary technology to provide business intelligence that benefits pharmaceutical, healthcare partners and the medical community at large. 

Interested in learning more? Check back any time and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for the latest and greatest in healthcare insights. 

To explore our exclusive business solutions, please visit us at sermo.com/business or email us at business@sermo.com

Footnotes

  1. Sermo Membership & Platform Analytics, 2023
  2. Sermo Physician Social Media Report, 2022