What a difference a year makes. Over the last 12 months we have been consciously positioning ourselves to be one of the most socially active pharmaceutical companies, by integrating social media marketing to engage patients.
During this time a lot of people have started asking what's happening with LEO Pharma Spain. Some of LEO Pharma Spain's Social Media profiles have become some of the biggest influencers in world health days, in Spanish and at international dermatology congresses.
In Spain, LEO is at the top of the rankings of influencers in Klout when compared to other big pharmaceutical companies, even reaching the same level as some leading international pharmaceutical accounts.
LEO's digital department only started one year ago, with a YouTube channel and a Twitter account, but we had a clear digital strategy to understood that if the focus is the patient then we had to listen to them and situate ourselves where their conversations were taking place.
People discovered that we are more than just a pharma company, in fact, we also help people achieve healthy skin when we develop the best possible solutions for patients and go beyond thinking only about physical products.
It was during World Psoriasis Day 2014 that I really understood what it meant to be patient-centred. Then I had a conversation with a person who had psoriasis on Facebook. Instead of talking about the treatments she uses she instead focused on her constant battle with the skin condition, and thanked me for LEO's awareness campaign.
But a company cannot have a significant social media presence if its employees aren't active users of a social network, as they play an important role in patient and HCP communication.
It's similarly impossible for a company's directors, and regulatory and legal departments, to be engaged if they don't understand and use social media.
At LEO Pharma Spain everyone contributes to communication, and this approach has allowed us to build a strong corporate reputation in social media as we engage with our audience at different levels and through different channels.
Patients want access to healthcare information via social media, and most importantly, they want to be heard by pharma. Healthcare professionals have become increasingly active on social media and, in my opinion, pharmaceutical companies have an important role to play here. That's why LEO Pharma Spain wants to break the traditional pharmaceutical approach through a more active use of social media.
In a short time LEO Pharma has reached the biggest Klout in Spain From the 187 pharma companies associated with the local industry association Farmaindustria, LEO Pharma has the most active Social Media profiles, whether those be its blog, or accounts on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook,YouTube, Linkedin or Pinterest - it is also the first Spain pharma company to have an Instagram profile.
Recently we won the Premios ASPID award for our #DescubreLaPsoriasis(#DiscoverThePsoriasis) social media campaign. With this campaign, we wanted to increase awareness of this disease so that people who suffer from Psoriasis could feel better understood by society by focusing on three key messages: psoriasis is not contagious; psoriasis affects 2 out of every 100 people; and psoriasis is a chronical disease, but it can be controlled.
As a result of our efforts, the campaign became viral on various social media networks and we reached an audience of 11 million people, had more than 6,000 photos and videos published, had 60,000 user interactions and received 30,000 video views.
However, the greatest achievement was managing to let the patients feel that society rallies around them more and that this little known disease is known a bit better.
See it on Scoop.it, via Social Media and Healthcare