Boehringer celebrates 50,000 Facebook ‘likes’
pharmafile | August 22, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Boehringer Ingelheim, Facebook, Janssen, Psoriasis 360, likes
Boehringer Ingelheim has celebrated the accumulation of 50,000 ‘likes’ for its formal Facebook page with a new video thanking its users.
BI wrote in its page: “Something has been cooking in the Social Media Lab here at Boehringer Ingelheim. We’ve been working hard to come up with a way to say THANK YOU for our over [sic] 50,000 Likes!
“We hope you enjoy this video we put together just for YOU!”
The video sees Allan Hillgrove, a member of the board of managing directors at BI, in a working restaurant with uplifting piano music in the background, saying: “At Boehringer we see social media as a very important communication channel between the company and you [the viewer]. It allows us to talk to you in a two-way conversation and to get your views, which we always appreciate.
“We started out corporate Facebook page in 2011 and look where we are now – with more than 50,000 likes, which we’re very excited about. So to our 50,000 likes on Facebook, we say thank you, and we look forward to many more conversations with you, and many others, in the future…you’re involvement means a lot to us.”
The private German firm is a prolific user of social media and was one of the first pharma companies on Twitter, and the first to develop gamification into its marketing strategy with the 2012 Facebook game Syrum. It also has a selection of videos on YouTube and a Pinterest page.
Difficulties on social media
But some firms have come a cropper on the networking site with the most notable failure from Janssen, which in March 2012 was forced to pull its award-winning Psoriasis 360 Facebook page.
The pharmaceuticals unit of Johnson & Johnson cited “an increasing amount of troublesome comments” for its decision, alhtough the company’s corporate remains on Facebook.
Since Psoriasis 360 was launched in 2010, Janssen says it had to remove a larger and larger proportion of posts. “Whenever a post on this page mentions a specific drug by name, or talks about the efficacy of a particular treatment is (or its side effects), we have to ask for it to be changed, or pull it,” it explained at the time.
BI has seemingly not had the same troubles with its campaigns, or at least has the staff to remove any ‘troublesome’ posts.
The company is about average when it comes to numbers of likes: Sanofi has nearly 38,000 likes, while fellow German firm Bayer has more than 94,000; Pfizer, has 71,000 likes, and finally Johnson & Johnson is currently at 55,000 likes.
But to put this in context other more public firms have much higher numbers, with Microsoft having 2.7 million likes and energy company Shell having an impressive 4.5 million likes.
But the question still remains as to just how much the firm is getting from its interaction with the public, and vice versa.
It should also be noted that in order to fully see a corporate page on Facebook, you have to ‘like’ it, meaning the numbers of likes do not necessarily illustrate the popularity of a firm or its site.
Ben Adams
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