Healthy Connections

What you’ll learn:

Effective community management is essential for healthcare brands to foster trust, enhance patient engagement, and strengthen brand loyalty through active engagement rather than passive content delivery.

Klick’s pioneering social media tools, like KCM+AI, enable healthcare brands to manage communities safely and compliantly, with real-time monitoring and advanced moderation to ensure regulatory adherence.

Data-driven engagement strategies, including creator partnerships and real-time interactive sessions, help healthcare brands build deeper connections, improve patient outcomes, and optimize community management.

Social media is vital for healthcare brands to build and nurture communities of all types: patient, caregiver, or HCP. Beyond building communities, effective social media management can drive measurable impacts—from increasing brand loyalty to enhancing patient engagement and even improving health outcomes. Therefore, the power of effective community management extends beyond simply responding to comments. It fosters trust, enhances patient engagement, and strengthens overall brand loyalty. For healthcare brands, mastering community management is a necessity.

Of the 1,074 known pharmaceutical Facebook properties, 159 are corporate manufacturers and 915 are therapeutics (283 unbranded and 535 branded). Less than half of the corporate manufacturers (148) and therapeutics (227 unbranded and 134 branded) allow comments on their Facebook property.

At Klick, we understand this better than anyone.

As pioneers in social media management for life sciences, we’ve set the standard through innovative tools and strategies that enable healthcare brands to engage their communities safely and effectively. Our award-winning work builds communities and focuses on behavior change. We’ve helped orchestrate some of the most popular pharma social campaigns ever built with millions of followers, engagements, and reactions across social platforms. Through strategic community management, we’ve built opportunities for genuine connection, impacting patient lives in an industry initially hesitant to participate in social media.

From understanding the difference between audience and community to effectively leveraging creators, let’s explore how healthcare brands can cultivate an impactful community engagement strategy.

Source: Image adapted for article from Tint sourc

Understanding the Difference: Audience vs. Community

Understanding the difference between an audience and a community is at the core of any successful social media strategy. While the terms seem interchangeable, they represent distinct concepts with different implications for your brand.

An audience consists of people who passively consume content. This relationship is typically one-to-many, where the brand broadcasts its message to followers. On the other hand, a community is a dynamic group of individuals who interact with the brand and each other. Communities are built around shared interests, challenges, or goals, making them a powerful tool for creating deeper relationships and increasing brand loyalty.

For healthcare brands, focusing on community-building rather than just audience-building can lead to meaningful conversations, enhanced patient peer-to-peer support, and improved healthcare outcomes.

Klick handled management and moderation for what ended up being the largest unbranded Facebook page in pharma. Although the campaign has since ended, this page received over a thousand comments per day, and members would interact with each other and the fictional characters featured in the campaign. Much good came from this discussion as we found that even sensitive health topics were open for discussion by real people who used their real names.

Klick’s Expertise in Social Media Management

Since 2015, Klick has been at the forefront of transforming social media management for healthcare brands. That year, we launched Klick Comment Moderator (KCM), a groundbreaking tool designed to ensure brand safety in pharma and life sciences. KCM made an immediate impact by providing healthcare companies with a reliable solution to manage social media engagement while adhering to strict compliance guidelines. By holding social media comments for review, particularly those involving sensitive information or pharmacovigilance concerns, KCM became a critical component of social strategies across therapeutic areas like behavioral health, immunology, and neurology. KCM, specifically, combines safety with efficiency. Measured against the platform-provided tools, KCM was four times faster for moderation.

The success of KCM paved the way for KCM+AI, the next evolution in social media moderation. Powered by Microsoft Azure AI and trained on real world community management activity, KCM+AI builds on KCM's legacy, offering 24/7 real-time monitoring and selective comment-holding. KCM+AI enhances the pharmacovigilance process, allowing community managers to focus on more complex engagement tasks while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Monitoring and Responding to Comments and Messages

Effective community management starts with attentive monitoring. In healthcare, this means staying on top of every comment, message, and mention across all social media channels. Your community managers are the first line of defense—they are the eyes and ears of your brand online. They understand the nuances of pharma marketing and the regulatory landscape. In partnership with our Science + Regulator team, two sets of highly skilled eyes have visibility into the potential impact of all comments and can advise accordingly.

Here are three tips for effective social media monitoring:

1. Use Advanced Monitoring Tools: Invest in platforms that provide real-time alerts for mentions, comments, and messages across social media. Klick’s KCM+AI enhances these efforts by offering 24/7 monitoring tailored for the life sciences industry. This AI-powered tool automatically hides and flags comments that require moderation, ensuring your brand remains compliant and responsive.

2. Prioritize Responses: Not all comments are created equal. Develop a tiered response strategy where urgent inquiries are prioritized, particularly those related to medical concerns or negative feedback. Create a response protocol for common scenarios, such as misinformation, patient complaints, or medical inquiries. This approach ensures consistency in communication and helps community managers respond swiftly and accurately. Tools like Sprout Social can segment and prioritize comments based on sentiment and urgency. KCM+AI supports this initiative by holding comments that need careful review, allowing your team to focus on high-priority responses while automating the handling of routine inquiries.

3. Ensure the Team is Pharma-First: Your community should be managed by those who understand pharma marketing, from regulatory implications to adverse event reporting. That way, they can tackle and escalate appropriately, relying on available resources to address potential issues. Incorporating AI tools like KCM+AI can streamline this process by detecting and flagging potential issues in real time, but having a well-trained human team ready to manage nuanced situations is equally critical.

Maintaining a positive tone is essential to monitoring your social media communications, especially when dealing with sensitive healthcare topics. Every interaction should reflect empathy, support, and professionalism. This approach helps manage your brand's reputation and ensures compliance with industry regulations. By combining traditional monitoring tools with advanced AI applications like KCM+AI, your community management strategy can be efficient and responsive, safeguarding your brand while fostering trust and engagement.

Engaging Followers

Engagement is the heartbeat of community management. It's not enough just to post content; successful social healthcare brands must actively engage with their followers, creating spaces where they feel comfortable talking about one of the most sensitive topics: Their health. This engagement can be as simple as liking and sharing user-generated content or as involved as responding to comments and questions meaningfully.

One of the most effective ways to enhance engagement is through partnerships with content creators. Creators and patient ambassadors who resonate with your target demographic can extend your reach and add credibility to your community. By selecting creators who align with your brand values, you can foster deeper connections with your audience.

Hosting Interactive Sessions

For the most advanced social brands, interactive sessions such as live Q&As, webinars, or even virtual patient forums offer an excellent real-time opportunity to engage your community. Planning and promoting these events is critical to building excitement and awareness in the potential audience and ensuring participation. These events, whether HCP- or patient-focused, provide a platform for direct communication between your brand and its community members.

Source: Klick Wire, Issue 616

Real-time interactions boost engagement and provide immediate insights into stakeholder concerns and preferences. They allow healthcare brands to address questions on the spot, demonstrate scientific leadership, and build stronger relationships with their community members.

Analyzing Engagement Metrics

To master community management, you must continuously measure and analyze your efforts. Key metrics such as response times, interaction rates, comment categorization, and sentiment analysis provide valuable insights into how well your strategies are working and where to make improvements in the future.

When community management is included alongside more promotional initiatives in a Media Mix Modeling (MMM) analysis, it comes out strong, similar to creator engagements. Smaller brands without a full MMM still measure results, with comments, sentiment, saves, and topics as the primary measures.

Klick uses tools to track these metrics and identify what’s working and where there’s room for improvement. By embedding the Community Management team inside Social Strategy, we enable osmotic learning throughout the organization. For example, if we notice that posts featuring patient stories generate higher engagement, we adjust the content strategy accordingly.

Adjusting your approach based on these insights ensures that your social and community management strategies remain effective and aligned with your brand goals.

Trust in HCPs remains high, with 73% of people trusting their primary care provider for information about new innovations and technologies. Trust in pharmacists is also strong at 70%. However, trust in healthcare CEOs and government leaders is significantly lower.

Source: Klick Wire, Issue 610

Conclusion

Creating an impactful community management strategy is no small feat. Still, the rewards for healthcare brands are significant and can change a campaign from talking AT the audience to talking WITH them. By understanding the nuances between an audience and a community, monitoring and engaging effectively, leveraging creator partnerships, and maintaining a consistent, data-driven approach, healthcare brands can build thriving online communities.

These communities enhance brand loyalty and contribute to better patient outcomes and stronger healthcare experiences. In an industry where trust and credibility are paramount, effective community management is a powerful tool for long-term success.

Ready to transform your healthcare brand’s community management? Connect with Klick to learn how our customized tools and strategies can drive engagement, build trust, and elevate patient outcomes.