Two years ago, most everybody in biotech had heard of Twitter but most people were looking for reasons to ignore it. A year ago, people in the industry began realizing that even though they’re busy, it’s not a fad, and maybe they see what the fuss was about.
Now we’re just beginning to see what this real-time platform for news and commentary can do for healthcare innovation. And what comes next will do the industry a lot of good.
It’s hard to get reliable numbers on the usage of Twitter, but one estimate I’ve seen says the 140-character microblog service is on track to reach 250 million active users by the end of 2012. Many of the earliest adopters of this six-year-old service were in the tech industry (no surprise), but there’s now a firestorm of more than 400 million tweets a day about presidential politics, Middle East revolutions, music, sports, high-tech gadgets, and all kinds of culture high and low. A small percentage of Twitter’s overall traffic comes from discussion of drugs, devices, diagnostics, or healthcare in general, but it’s all there and growing fast, too. Again, this growth is hard to measure, but earlier this year, Brian Reid of the PR firm WCG (@brianreid) posted a map that showed the growth and expanding reach of Twitter usage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Biotech Begins to Come of Age on Twitter | Xconomy
