Many social media tools are available for health care professionals (HCPs), including social networking platforms, blogs, microblogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, and virtual reality and gaming environments. These tools can be used to improve or enhance professional networking and education, organizational promotion, patient care, patient education and public health programs. The pharmaceutical industry would benefit from working more closely with online doctors communities, but a lack of vision is holding companies back, Lots of pharma marketers are just oblivious to these types of platforms. Unfortunately many marketers are still governed by their marketing mindset and there’s a lack of vision about how to use these types of platforms too. However, they also present potential risks to patients and HCPs regarding the distribution of poor-quality information, damage to professional image, breaches of patient privacy, violation of personal–professional boundaries, and licensing or legal issues. Many health care institutions and professional organizations have issued guidelines to prevent these risks.

Digital media have already been accepted by Pharma marketers as a powerful channel to engage doctors in the long run and digital content marketing is now the ‘’go-to online strategy’’ of most brand and product leads. Content Marketing Institute reports that the most successful marketers spent 40% of their budget on content marketing in 2018. Today’s pharma marketing teams look at leveraging webinars, online CMEs, healthcare news, microsites, mobile communication and social media channels to inform and engage customers. While doing so, they need to adhere to certain parameters for producing a smart and solid content marketing strategy that is effective, innovative, and addresses all the pain points of their audience related to product/therapy information.

Unlike physicians, pharmacists have been relatively slow to adopt social media and changing their marketing mindset. Much of the growth in the professional use of social media among this group appears to involve pharmacist-specific social networks. Surveys have shown that many pharmacists use Facebook. Although this use is most often for personal communications, more than 90 pages on Facebook are related to the pharmacy profession, such as the Pharmacists Interest Page, the American Pharmacists Association, and the Cynical Pharmacist. Only 10% of pharmacists use Twitter, and a search for “pharmacist” on LinkedIn identified 274,981 profiles.