Top 20 Pharmacist Social Media Influencers

I was curious, so I did a little digging this month to see who in pharmacy land these days was influencing the digital and social media spaces. Here’s my super informal, non-scientific analysis of the social media sphere.

Here were my criteria in hunting:

• In order to be ranked, people had to be a licensed or trained as a pharmacist. While I couldn’t be 100% sure they were licensed pharmacists, I either knew of them or could guess based upon what content they laid down that they were or are trained as pharmacists (like #6 below — since that person is anonymous). Sorry, non-pharmacists, companies, organizations and publications: I know there are plenty of you out there with super high social influence in healthcare and pharmacy spaces, but I wanted to specifically look at individual pharmacists in this search. There are reasons why I wanted to look specifically at pharmacists in this analysis too, as I have a theory that most pharmacists are social-media-phobic, which is TERRIBLE for our profession. Social media influence is another way we can advocate for ourselves, our patients, and our profession. I don’t know if that’s a product of pharmacy schools NOT teaching students how to properly use social media, or that employers muzzle their pharmacists through draconian social media policies. (BTW, if so, what. A. Travesty.) Rant over.

That aside…

• Pharmacists being analyzed had to have a social score. The social index tool I used (which I won’t name — you can do your own homework to discover what’s still out there after Klout died, may it RIP) did not have some pharmacists’ social scores listed. If there was no score, I obviously couldn’t measure it.
• The social tool I used DID look at more than Twitter. Even though I’m about to throw down Twitter followers as a metric, the list below is ranked from highest to lowest social media index score (#1 had the highest social media influence score on the index I used, and #20 had the lowest). The indexing was WIDE in terms of distribution among the top 20 pharmacists I could find too who actually had scores. Someone with more influence and less followers could rank higher than someone else with sheer higher numbers of followers, but less social influence. Also, it takes into account other social platforms. For example, Twitter isn’t personally the channel where I have the largest following.

Items I noticed: Shocker, but men are dominating here, and we could definitely use more diversity. Except there was one, bright shining spotlight of a woman who trounced everyone on the list with a nearly perfect social media influence score: Leticia Van de Putte. THIS almost made up for the fact that there was a paucity of women on the top 10 list. Ladies in pharmacy — we’ve got more work to do!

If you’d like the full top 20 list with their social influence scores via the social media tool I used — you can obtain the list here.

Pharmacists for daring to share on social about our profession — thank you!

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Erin L. Albert is a co-founder of Social Media Dames Unconference Series, entrepreneur, author, podcaster, and senior director of education at ASCP. Opinions here are her own. Social media rankings of influence were obviously ranked by the tool she used, which is shared at the full list site above.