Pharmaceutical Marketing and the New Social Media

Facebook and Twitter, the largest social media Web sites, have more than 350 million users worldwide, and surveys indicate that 60% of Americans turn first to the Internet when seeking health-related information.¹ It is therefore surprising that the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries have been slow to establish a social media presence. The drug industry allocated less than 4% of the more than $4 billion it spent on direct-to-consumer advertising to Internet outlets in 2008, and only a tiny fraction of that was for social networking sites.² In the next year, however, the proportion may change substantially.Since the Pure Food . . .