Recent changes made by Facebook eliminated a special exemption given to pharma and healthcare pages, which allowed them to block all commenting on their Wall posts. That changed a week ago. Some companies responded to the change by eliminating their pages, while others have embraced the change (if reluctantly) and have begun to engage with people on Facebook (see which pages did what here). While Facebook is notorious for making changes to their platform without much notice, this change was announced well in advance. However, Facebook did roll out one additional change at the same time that pharma and healthcare companies can leverage to help them comply with government regulations. This feature isn’t well known from what I’ve heard in discussions with many people working in the industry, so I thought I’d show you what it is.
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I’m Off to SXSW…So Why Should You Care?
Tomorrow morning (6am flight for some reason), I’m off to the annual SXSW conference in Austin. For those who read this blog and work in healthcare and always have, you might not even know what the conference is. You should. It’s become the premier digital technology, media, and marketing conference in the world over the past few years. While there are film and music tracks to the conference, the biggest part is now the interactive track. So, if you have anything with digital technology (including using a computer), you might look into this conference. CNN actually had a nice article today about why SXSW matters. And for the first time this year, there’s actually a dedicated group of health-related sessions.
That’s one of the reasons I’m going. I’m interested in a few of the health-related sessions, but I’m not going to solely focus my time there. I’ve heard a lot of it already. Instead, I’m going for two big reasons. First, I’m speaking there (that’s slide number 1 at the top of this post). More on that in a minute. Second, I’m always on the lookout for what other industries are doing and what’s up and coming and trying to figure out how pharma and healthcare companies can leverage it. It’s usually years before healthcare companies adopt things that are old hat in other companies. This is especially true when it comes to digital technology and marketing. Looking at what other pharma companies are doing in digital in hopes of learning something will teach you one thing:
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Facebook Pages Just Got Easier for Brands
In case you didn’t notice, Facebook just released some dramatic changes to the way Pages work. It’s a massive upgrade that I see as something that makes it much easier for brands to use Facebook (even pharma and healthcare brands). I’m going to try to run through these changes and show you what’s new and how to use it. There have already been some good overviews of the changes (here’s Facebook’s official release), so I’m going to try to inform you of a few things that I haven’t seen talked about much and also give you a couple of tips I haven’t seen yet. I’ll also throw in a few new tricks too.
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