A Historic Day: The First Branded Pharma Tweet

By Ross Fetterolf, VP Digital Strategy at Ignite Health
(On twitter @digitalbulldog)

Well, it’s official – it took a total of 12 tweets before diabetes patient/racecar driver Charlie Kimball produced the first branded tweet on his Race With Insulin Twitter page (@racewithinsulin, http://twitter.com/racewithinsulin). See my previous post on this initiative here.

The effort is sponsored by Novo Nordisk, and includes both Levemir and Novolog important safety information and logos as part of the Twitter page background. The tweet itself represents (to this blogger's knowledge) the first ever officially branded tweet in the Pharma space, and can now be used as a model for other companies who want to adopt this approach:

The tweet includes both the full product name (brand name and generic), and includes a link to the full prescribing information for Levemir within the tweet itself. This represents a particularly “safe” (and hopefully FDA friendly) approach, and one that also translates well to the mobile space – in case users aren’t viewing Charlie’s tweet on the Race With Insulin page directly, but instead on their mobile device.

I wonder if Charlie’s 125 followers have their Levemir flexpen’s primed and ready to inject along with Charlie when it’s time for his next dose. We’ll have to wait and see.