Does Facebook matter for pharma companies the way they think it does?

Over the last few weeks, pharma companies and those who follow pharma have been talking about Facebook not allowing pharma to continue to block comments on their pages. I have been confused by all of the fuss this causes.

Wool Labs has been studying patient and physician experiences and behavior online for a few years now. In the hundreds of studies we have performed, Facebook has never been one of the top 200+ sites that houses or shares influential content for patients or physicians. Never. What we mean by influential content is content that patients and/or physicians read, discuss, comment on, share with others, use to make decisions, and change behavior.

So as far as we can see (as we see very far indeed), Facebook pages do not host deep, involved, well-read, or heavily discussed content consumed by patients and/or physicians who suffer from or follow a particular disease/condition or use/prescribe a particular treatment.

Now, of course pharma-sponsored sites don't allow comments so that explains why their sites don't show up in our studies. But presumably a patient who is discussing his/her condition would allow comments and invite others to share similar stories. And we see those but they are not drawing the thousands or tens of thousands of patients that others sites draw. And those non-Facebook sites are what need to matter to pharma.

Patients and physicians share their experiences all across the Internet from well organized disease-specific communities to personal blogs to seemingly unrelated non-health sites.

So while I think it is sad to see some pharma companies pulling Facebook pages, as I always want to see pharma involved with their customers. I would also like to see pharma put as much effort into studying the rest of the Internet as I have seen them put into Facebook.

It is the rest of the Internet that is screaming for pharma to pay attention. It is the rest of the Internet where pharma can learn what their patients and physician believe and how they choose their actions. It is the rest of the Internet that influences and therefore, matters more.