In a recent study conducted by Acceleration Point of over 50,000 Key Opinion Leaders, 54% are part of online scientific discussion in social media, news, and the web.  Most of these experts are not posting content themselves, but rather are mentioned or quoted by others, or contribute to the online content of institutions.  In the study, 18% of these KOLs had a twitter account though some specialties’ KOL Twitter accounts were as high as 40%.  What’s more, these KOLs mention a product or disease an average of 60 times each month.

The recency, volume, and speed in which these digital insights are available make them a valuable source for medical affairs.  There are two ways to look at KOL social monitoring data to discover insights.

1. Patterns and Trends

The first way to find insights in social data is to examine the conversation across all your KOL experts.  By analyzing all the contributions across experts, you can identify the diseases discussed, treatments mentioned, and key topics that are relevant to medical affairs.  Insights from group data allows you to see trending topics, how topics have changed over time, and see spikes in topics at specific times.  From here you can also look to see how those patterns and trends are different based on KOL segment or geography.

While you could read all the contributions from your experts, tools like Kwello by Acceleration Point utilize natural language processing to make this analysis fast.  On a single page you can see these analytics and click on them to filter the thousands of contributions you have available down to those that are about specific topics of interest to you.

2. Triggers to Act

Not all insights require longitudinal views of data reviewed by a committee.  Sometimes data provides insight to the right person to take immediate action.  These triggers to act are typically found when reviewing the online contributions of a single expert.  While monitoring your territory or global KOL list you may see that your expert is going to be speaking, is talking about a particular mechanism of action, or is sharing their view on some recently released data.  These insights often provide opportunities to reach out to a KOL or better informs engagements you already have planned.

The more data you have on your expert, the more opportunities that exist.  By utilizing a KOL social monitoring platform like Kwello you can see both the content posted by your expert, and all the content that is posted by others about or including your expert.  This is typically 500 times more online scientific content.

Your Key Opinion Leaders are bringing the scientific discussion online.  By ensuring a simple process supported by easy-to-use tools you can find new actionable insights.  Click here to learn more about Kwello, the first KOL Social Monitoring Platform built specifically for medical affairs.