Pharma Industry LinkedIn Leaders of 2020

A final glimpse before LinkedIn closed its doors to competitor benchmarking

Gathering competitor intelligence from the LinkedIn platform has become a lot harder since summer 2020. This has made the platform somewhat of an enigma compared to Facebook and Twitter, particularly when it comes to benchmarking and competitor research for pharma companies.

Previously, not only was I able to use a piece of software to review and audit my clients’ company pages, but I could do the same for their competitors pages and organic content – sophisticated snooping as I like to call it. More on this later….

This data was helpful for getting a sense of clients’ B2B social media reputation and benchmarking against other players in the pharma sector.

So what changed?

Pre-June, LinkedIn’s API (Application Programming Interface) allowed anyone to use a third-party app to audit and analyse other companies’ activity on the platform.

Without getting too technical, LinkedIn’s API allows app developers to build software that integrates with the platform and gain access to certain data. But in June, LinkedIn announced they were switching off the API’s benchmarking facility so that analysis (or scraping) of other companies’ pages and content through third party apps would no longer be possible.

But why did it change?

LinkedIn was cagey about their reasons. The likelihood is that as the platform becomes busier and organic views decline, paid promotion will become more prominent. From LinkedIn’s perspective it makes sense commercially to guard this type of data.

So for now, the only way to get this level of data is through a time-sapping manual audit (eek)!

A final analysis of the pharma sector LinkedIn landscape

However, before the API update, I was fortunate to collect data showing how 9 global pharma companies’ LinkedIn pages compared across a range of metrics; number of followers, follower growth, number of posts, engagement rates, most engaging topics etc. This pharma social data was pre-COVID 19 and the content landscape has undoubtedly changed but it provides interesting insights and comparative data from a single point in time.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to reveal the best (and worst) performing organic posts, with insights, learnings and tips to help you increase engagement and produce better quality content for your LinkedIn campaigns. Keep an eye out on my LinkedIn page for updates.

If you’d like support developing your LinkedIn strategy and campaigns that exceed your objectives, please get in touch with us.