Leveraging Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 476

Table 16.1 Utilization of social media platforms by top 20 pharmaceutical companies

Physician
or patient
community

Revenue
(million)

Facebook
page Rank Company Blog Youtube Twitter

Top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on 2010 revenues
1

Pfizer $58,523 Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s No

2 Novartis $44,420 No Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

3 Merck & Co. $39,811 No Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

4 Sanofi $37,403 No Ye s Ye s Ye s No

5 GlaxoSmithKline $36,156 Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s No

6 AstraZeneca $32,515 Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

7 Johnson & Johnson $22,396 Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

8 Eli Lilly & Co. $21,685 Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s No

9 Abbott Laboratories $19,894 No Ye s Ye s Ye s No

10 Bristol-Myers Squibb $19,484 Ye s No Ye s Ye s Ye s

11 Teva $16,121 No Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

12 Takeda Pharma $14,829 No No Ye s No No

13 Bayer Schering $14,485 No Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

14 Boehringer-Ingelheim $12,883 No Ye s Ye s Ye s No

15 Astellas $11,161 No Ye s Ye s Ye s No

16 Daiichi-Sankyo $10,794 No No Ye s Ye s No

17 EISAI $8,542 No No Ye s Ye s No

18 Otsuka Pharmaceutical $8,440 No No Ye s No No

19 Gilead Sciences $7,390 No No Ye s Ye s Ye s

20 Mylan $5,404 No No Ye s No No

Source : Revenue figures are from ContractPharma.com

firm sales in offline settings (Arndt 1967 ; Coleman et al. 1966 ). WOM is impactful
because consumers are more likely to trust information from their peers than from
advertising. The more similar the sender and the receiver are to each other, the more
persuasive WOM is (Kruglansk and Mayseless 1990 ).
With the rise of social networks and social media, researchers have shifted the
context of study for WOM from offline settings to online settings where WOM
operates through social networks and social media. WOM in social media differs
from the general WOM in offline setting in three important aspects. First, WOM in
social media is much more accessible and scalable than the general WOM in offline
settings. WOM in the form of user-generated contents created by users of social
media are exposed to an enormous audience—all other network members or even
all Internet users. In contrast, offline WOM is only confined to parties involved in
the interpersonal communication. For example, A can tell B about A's usage experi-
ence of a product, and that general WOM can only have impact on B's evaluation
about the discussed product. If A goes online and posts a review about that product
on a popular online review site like Amazon.com, then the same piece of WOM
information can be viewed by millions of others and therefore could have a much
stronger impact than it could offline.