Pharmaceutical companies have
started joining Google’s new social network with Roche and Pfizer the first to
set up official Google+ presences.
Roche has two pages, a corporate and an HR one, while Pfizer’s Turkish subsidiary has set up a company page.
The social network was given a
limited launch in July and fully opened for registrations in September. By
October it had attracted 40m users, but
has a long way to go to catch up with Facebook or Twitter.
Fake pages are already an
issue on Google+ and Roche’s head of corporate internet and social media Sabine
Kostevc explained that one of the reasons she set up Roche’s corporate page was
to “reserve the space”. She said: “I do not see our
target audiences active on Google+, so I have no concrete plan on how to use it
yet. From my personal point of view it is still very much in beta and a
playground for techies and the social networking avant-garde.
“Google+ will most likely
become an important factor for search engine ranking. But, given limited
resources, I'm focusing for now on helping the organisation to engage on the
networks where our audiences are.” Over time use of Google+ is
likely to increase due to the way the search giant can tie it together with its
various online properties, which include the Gmail email service and video
sharing site YouTube.
Google’s ‘real name’ policy
could potentially give it an advantage over Twitter, though this doesn’t entirely
guarantee the use of real names and has already been the cause of some
controversy.
In July the company ruffled a
few feathers when it shut down thousands of accounts because of what it saw as
violations of its naming policy.
And pharma companies haven’t
been immune to Google’s restrictions. When starting to register the page with the
official company name "F. Hoffmann-La Roche", Roche had to try
alternative spellings as the "F." and the hyphen in the company’s
name failed to pass Google’s naming rules.
For now both Roche and Pfizer
are only tentatively using Google+, as befits a still emerging social network,
but already official pharma pages are outnumbered by fake ones. These overwhelmingly target
Pfizer, and one even cheekily suggests anyone interested in “aquiring”
the page should contact its current owner.
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