Meta’s new Threads: Is this a social media flash in the pan or real deal for pharma marketers?
Featured in Endpoints News: Meta’s new Threads: Is this a social media flash in the pan or real deal for pharma marketers?
When Shwen Gwee launched Vertex Pharmaceuticals on Twitter in 2010, he pitched it as a one-month experiment. No one at the then-precommercial biotech knew much about the social media platform, and so Gwee asked for feedback on Twitter at the end of the social experiment to convince leadership the brand should be there.
Fast forward 15 years, and Gwee is having déjà vu. The latest social media channel is Meta’s Threads — a text-based real-time public conversation app similar to Twitter — that launched two weeks ago. Threads quickly signed up more than 100 million users in less than a week. That’s about 20% of the Twitter population for those keeping score.
Gwee, a consultant and former head of global digital strategy at Bristol Myers Squibb, isn’t trying to convince any pharmas to join this time around, but he does think it’s a good idea for pharma brands to observe and learn — and at least reserve their brand names.