Why don’t drug companies use Twitter?

It seems that most industries are rushing to jump aboard the Twitter bandwagon.

That’s true for most cases, with the pharmaceutical industry being the exception.

David Williams points out the lack of Twitter activity from the major pharmaceutical companies, where many of the Pharma-related keywords being owned by those not affiliated with the company.

Worse, when he looks at the Twitter names for the top 10 prescribed drugs, they’re owned by either spam sites, or “Twittersquatters” who snap up the domain name, waiting for someone to approach them to buy it.

To their credit, the blog over at GlaxoSmithKline responded to the story, saying “the FDA’s recent communications on sponsored links raises questions about how Twitter can be used to communicate about prescription drug products. For example, FDA has made clear that the short 100 or so character ad copy used in sponsored links cannot be used for anything deemed to represent what the product is used for, without also including the safety information about the product in the sponsored link – a difficult challenge in such limited space.”

That said, I believe that Twitter will overtake both blogs and RSS as the information disseminator of choice, and not claiming these relevant keywords seems like a short-sighted social media strategy to me.