Do you know who the top digital key opinion leaders are for your disease state?
It’s a question medical affairs teams are increasingly asking as clinicians flock to social media to share opinions, insights, and knowledge, and to connect with their peers virtually. As we explained in an earlier post, this trend has accelerated amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, rendering the ability to analyze HCP activity on social media essential for medical affairs teams.
Since in-person meetings will likely remain a challenge well into 2021, it’s crucial to identify online opinion leaders who can help ensure the right scientific findings and information reach key audiences in a timely way.
Recognizing the growing importance of analyzing HCP social media activity, Komodo has developed new functionality to extract insights that can inform engagement strategies – and we’re serving them up to our customers alongside the patient-level insight we are known for.
Overlaying a digital signal on data already captured through Komodo’s Aperture platform, including scientific publications and presentations, industry partnerships, and clinical activities, medical affairs teams can seamlessly find the most influential and relevant digital KOLs on Twitter in a given therapy area as well as discover nascent influencers.
The key to social media insights in Aperture is the ability to filter based on a clinician’s level of influence. Komodo generates a social score for each clinician based on their number of followers and the level of engagement with their social media feed that focuses on a particular therapy area. Key engagement statistics include volume of posts, likes, shares, and replies. This unique metric enables teams to find digital KOLs that drive conversations and exert influence online. Going beyond surfacing just key opinion leaders, Aperture captures a full breadth of patient-level influencers who can be relevant for a variety of medical affairs initiatives.
Social media data is updated daily, ensuring emerging trends and developments can be identified in real time.
Some of the digital KOLs identified through this process may already be known thanks to their publication history or involvement in symposiums. But by highlighting clinicians based on their social influence, teams may also identify digital opinion leaders who are relatively unknown outside their social media presence.
A Case in Point: Lung Cancer
To illustrate how this works, Komodo recently analyzed Twitter conversations to identify digital opinion leaders from a key market focused on lung cancer who discussed this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting. This case study is described in more detail in our video on the new social media insights capability. By using the software, the team not only identified hundreds of oncologists nationally who were discussing the meeting but, through filtering, narrowed the search to six leading digital lung cancer KOLs in Ohio who used Twitter as a “megaphone” to amplify their message.
But that’s not all. Thanks to data pulled directly from Twitter to the social insights feature, once they have identified these KOLs, teams can use the platform to delve deep into the personal profiles of each physician, extracting insights about ongoing topics of interest as well as examining individual tweets.
Such insights can help medical affairs professionals identify influencers and shape strategies to reach and engage these digital opinion leaders with timely, relevant messaging. Using these insights, medical affairs teams can:- Find emerging and established influential digital opinion leaders for studies, advisory board seats, and medical partnerships.
- Bolster medical science liaison pre-call planning and expand field team capabilities to reach online influencers.
- Tailor engagement strategies to meet evolving expectations and needs by analyzing trending topics and online conversations.
- Reach HCPs who are otherwise difficult to engage by ensuring the digital opinion leaders they follow online have the latest medical information.
As physicians continue to turn to digital channels, medical affairs teams need to leverage social listening software to extract meaningful insights. By identifying top influencers and modifying core messaging based on trending topics, medical affairs teams can provide strategic direction for companies to navigate this rapidly changing environment.
Watch the video to learn more about how medical affairs teams can use social media insights to identify new influencers online.
Learn how Aperture can help you find digital opinion leaders here.
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