Significance of Social Media Analytics for the Life Sciences Industry

For quite some time now, social media analytics are being used by businesses all around the globe to extract customer data and utilize it for marketing purposes. User data extracted from social media is gold for online businesses, and you might not know it. Still, it is becoming increasingly crucial for all types of industries, including the Life Sciences Industry. This article will discuss how life science consulting firms can benefit from and utilize social media analytics.

Social media analytics play an essential role in Life Sciences Consulting Firms. Life Sciences companies need to ensure that they take advantage of social media analytics to grow their businesses. The challenge is how to maximize the opportunity and create value from social media insights. There are various opportunities which Life Sciences companies can utilize, such as:

• Increase disease awareness
• Improve the safety of patients
• Increase patient engagement

Social media has considerably changed the way our society manages health. It is estimated that around 80% of internet users search health information online, search for different diseases and their symptoms on Wikipedia and not just patients but many doctors and researchers use social media for high quality professional medical information. Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are interested in how social media analytics can manage health in the real world.

Social Media Analytics in the Life Sciences Industry

Social media analytics is a way to gather, comprehend, and characterize data in an actionable and meaningful way. Social analytics use machine learning-based tools for planning and research. Analytics provides you with a view of all social media platform conversations and behavioral patterns that affect your market, assisting you in achieving your business goals.

According to IDC Health Insights, investments in social media analytics are rapidly increasing, and it is expected to increase significantly over the next several years. The Life Sciences industry has been a little slow to embrace social media and take advantage of its analytics because of the lack of regulatory guidance, ambiguity around proper procedures, and risks related to tracking adverse events. This has kept Life Sciences companies away from utilizing this technique as much as they should have.

However, many Life Sciences Consulting Firms have started using social media analytics to improve patient engagement and gain patient insights to get the best quality and personalized medicines. Social media analytics data allows Pharmaceutical companies to get a clear picture of patients’ sentiments and most used hashtags, which help know the trend that needs to be followed to maximize profits. Life Sciences companies need to gather all the information they get from Social media analytics to gain new insights into untapped areas, such as personalized medicines and rare diseases they can work upon to become a leader in the Life Sciences Industry.

Benefits of Social Media Analytics

If Life Sciences companies know how to work on the insights and information gained from all social media platforms, they can enjoy several benefits in the future. Some of those benefits are discussed below:

1. Drug Discovery and Development:

With the help of social media analytics, Life Sciences companies can sensibly search vast data sets of patents, clinical trials, and scientific publications data to help advance the discovery of new drugs by permitting researchers to examine previous test results. Doctors in the pharma industry can gain pertinent information and insights into the opportunities to yield the best analytical techniques.

2. Gain Customer Insights:

Data gathered from social media and Google searches will be an early signal for Life Sciences organizations regarding product safety. Moreover, these companies can think of ways in which all the data can be used more proficiently. Big companies in the Life Sciences Industry will begin advanced analytics techniques like net scraping/web scraping. All the relevant data is extracted from relevant websites to gain insights about customer’s opinions and feedback.  Companies can write down all the important information from the web to examine that knowledge. This may help companies see the bigger picture of the general public sentiment towards the brand and its product.

3. Target Underserved Markets:

Life Sciences companies will quickly recognize the new, niche, and underserved markets by social media analytics to interpret information from varied sources like social media and electronic medical records.

Challenges and Solutions of Using Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics has many benefits, but at the same time, there are many challenges for companies who use it. These challenges include privacy issues, large amounts of data that become difficult to analyze, and leaking of customer information, which is against ethical law.

Life Sciences Companies need to follow these simple rules to overcome the challenges and benefit from these Social media analytics:

1. Get Consent From Users Before Using Their Information:

It is the duty of all companies to get consent from users and inform them that their information will be used for research. If, and only if, users agree to it, that piece of data should be analyzed. The companies must also ensure that the users know every detail of how and why their information will be used and how long it will be stored with the company.

2. Minimize the Data:

Data minimization is an integral part of any research. Companies need to list down all the main points that they need to gather for their research and then pick out that part of information only. Companies need to make sure that there is no personal information in the data they have extracted.

3. Ensure Accountability for Any Leaked Customer Information:

Companies should have proper rules for safely storing the personal information of their customers. In case of any information/data leakage, customers should be informed immediately of all the preventive actions the company will take to solve the issue. This will help companies gain customer’s trust and allow them to use their information for research in the future.

Conclusion

Social media platforms have several choices for in-depth analytics. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have internal options to look at trends and demographics. Alternative sites like Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and even Salesforce can integrate social media and look at analytics. Use these numbers to regulate your content strategy. Your social media analytics facilitate improving the ROI of your Life Science Company.

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