Medical Congresses and Conferences offer Medical Affairs (MA) teams access to a wealth of knowledge on new trends within the industry. They are a tried-and-tested way to gain insights, network, and collaborate.
However, participating in these events can be costly, exhausting, and time-consuming for your Medical Affairs team. So, how do you ensure that the resources you allocate to this activity are well spent and that what you take away from it has a tangible impact on your business?
In this article, we want to share a few strategies that illustrate how you can leverage social listening data to assess when to participate and engage with relevant stakeholders. We’ll also cover how to ensure you leave the event with valuable insights that directly align with your organization’s goals and empower you to make data-driven decisions.
Evaluate Medical Congress ROI
If your team has historically found it challenging to assess the impact and value generated by your attendance at past events, Social Listening can help in three major ways:
- Track key engagement metrics: Social Listening tools allow you to track key engagement metrics for congress-related social posts from past events. With a single click, you can easily see the number of likes, mentions, comments, and shares. When these metrics are analyzed, it’s easy to see how effective your efforts were, as well as the level of audience engagement. It’s also helpful to look at trends over time so that you can compare engagement from one event to another.
- Track sentiment indicators: Audience sentiment is how your audience feels about the Medical Congress and the topics covered. Social listening tools can easily determine whether most of your previous engagement was positive, negative, or neutral and assess the quality of these interactions. It can also determine the sentiment of upcoming events so you can get a better idea of whether it’s worth attending.
- Determining influence: How much reach and traction do you actually get by participating? Social listening tools help you track the number of impressions on your congress-related content to help you determine your overall impact.
Track Competitor Activity
The way to stay ahead in the medical and pharmaceutical industries is to let data drive your decisions, and Social Listening empowers you to capture data that is timely, relevant, and specific.
This is particularly helpful for tracking competitor activity at Medical Congresses. Here’s why:
- Identify key competitors: By monitoring relevant hashtags, mentions, and social media accounts associated with the congress, medical teams can identify key competitors and track their activities. This includes understanding which organizations are present, the key individuals that are representing them, and the specific topics they are prioritizing.
- Analyze competitor strategies: Social Listening tools allow you to analyze your competitors’ content, providing insights into their strategies. By examining the topics they emphasize, the platforms they use, their engagement levels, and the overall tone of their communication, you can better understand their messaging, target audience, and approach. In turn, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how they’re positioning themselves within the market.
- Keep an eye on important discussions: Social Listening ensures you never miss an event that your competition is involved in. You’ll gain information on the discussed topics, arguments made, and the audience’s reaction. With this information, you can work on counter-strategies or look for potential areas of non-competitive collaboration.
- Identifying opportunities for differentiation: By understanding your competitors’ activities and strategies, you can identify opportunities to differentiate your own organization. This might involve refining your messaging, focusing on different target audiences, or highlighting unique aspects of your products or services.
These insights can inform the way you develop your engagement strategies and ensure your operation maintains a sharp competitive edge.
Identify KOLs, Network, And Engage
In a field as data-driven as the medical field, it takes a lot more to stay at the forefront than attendance at events that, while incredibly valuable, happen sporadically.
Medical Conferences and Congresses are only part of the puzzle. The other part is constituted by digital media like news platforms, blogs, publications—in short, the web at large—and one-on-one engagements with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs).
All of these approaches to capturing insights should be complementary. But, even more importantly, they should inform the way you approach key events in your industry.
Congresses give you the opportunity to establish in-person connections with HCPs and KOLs. The more knowledgeable you are, the better prepared you’ll be to ensure these connections are strategic, meaningful, and successful.
Social Listening helps you prepare to make the most of in-person events by:
- Providing you with quality social media data year-round that you can then use to drive your engagement strategies with KOLs.
- Helping you identify KOLs by monitoring their overall influences in their respective areas of expertise.
- It can also give you key insights into DOLs (Digital Opinion Leaders) that you might not be able to access if your only focus is in-person events, as well as healthcare professionals, patient advocates, researchers, industry experts, and other key players.
What is more, using your knowledge of emerging trends to expand your network and initiate social media conversations will situate you as an industry leader. This position makes it easy to engage with KOLs during Congresses and explore collaboration and knowledge-sharing opportunities.
Stay Informed and Enhance Engagement Remotely
Analytics provided by Social Monitoring allow you to stay informed about the knowledge shared at Medical Conferences and Congresses you can’t attend in person. They give you an easy way to keep track of what you missed so you can still participate in relevant online discussions.
Here’s how:
- Keep up to date with the latest research: Advanced Social Listening platforms use natural language processing to track specialized medical hashtags and identify emerging research findings. For example, you can set up these tools to alert you when groups, events, or accounts you’re listening to present breakthrough clinical trial results or post updates about key treatment guidelines. They automatically categorize content by therapeutic area, ensuring you receive relevant updates, whether you’re focused on rare diseases or broad conditions like cardiovascular disease.
- Boost engagement: With the data collected from social listening tools, you can be part of the conversation by sharing relevant posts, leaving engaging comments, and creating your own original content. These online interactions will help boost your engagement and extend your influence.
FAQs
What is Social Monitoring in healthcare?
Social Monitoring in healthcare involves using tools and practices to analyze and track online conversations, sentiments, mentions, and related medical topics. It involves using social media platforms, online forums, blogs, and other digital channels where industry professionals discuss healthcare experiences, opinions, and research.
What metrics should be tracked during social monitoring?
Key metrics to monitor include:
- Volume of mentions: How often the congress hashtag and related keywords are being used.
- Reach and impressions: The potential audience that has seen the mentions.
- Sentiment: Whether the conversations are positive, negative, or neutral.
- Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and retweets.
- Top KOLs and HCPs: Identifying the most influential voices in the conversation.
- Share of voice: Comparing mentions of your congress to competitors.
- Trending topics: Understanding the key themes emerging from the discussions.
What are the challenges of social media monitoring for Medical Congresses?
Social media monitoring for Medical Congresses, while valuable, presents several challenges. These include being overwhelmed by the volume of data, protecting patient privacy, accurately gauging the tone of medical conversations, filtering out irrelevant content, and pinpointing the most influential voices.
What usually happens at Medical Congresses?
During Medical Congresses, industry experts, researchers, and HCPs gather to discuss topics like patient care, new technology, research results, and the latest advancements. The event typically includes panel discussions, workshops, and keynote speeches.
Are Social Listening tools worth it?
Social Listening tools are incredibly valuable in healthcare for managing brand reputation, gaining patient insights, tracking public health trends, analyzing competitors, and managing crises. They allow healthcare organizations to understand public perception, improve patient care, identify misinformation, and enhance marketing efforts, making them increasingly worth the investment.
Get Ahead with Social Monitoring for Medical Congresses
From staying informed about trending topics to connecting with Key Opinion Leaders, social media monitoring offers your operation a range of exciting benefits to look forward to and can uncover a wealth of raw data from both inside and outside the congress room.
A social listening platform designed specifically for medical affairs can supercharge these benefits and be an invaluable tool in your Medical Affairs strategy as a whole.
Here at Acceleration Point, we are proud to have developed Kwello—an all-in-one platform that leverages AI (Artificial Intelligence) and streamlines Social Monitoring for Medical Affairs teams. Visit our website to learn more and connect with our team.
