Social media listening is one of the most recent tools offered to supplement, and sometimes even replace, primary data collection (e.g. interviews and surveys). Health issues represent a large proportion of discussions on social media. Social media generates an almost unlimited open source of genuine, unprompted insights on disease management and treatments.
Modern social listening tools allow us to semi-automatically collect huge chunks of text data on a topic in a fast and inexpensive manner. Coupled with smart text analysis powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can statistically analyze large amounts of unstructured data (e.g. Google® translate, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, etc.).
Social media listening
Pros
- Unprompted, genuine insights
- Fast and inexpensive
- Unlimited open source patient data
- Ever-improving AI text analysis
Cons
- Less accurate than structured data analysis
- HCP data is more limited
