Last month, Symplur was again asked by the UK's PM Society for their 2016 Digital Awards in London to analyze and present the winner of the Social Media Pharma Company of the Year award. So what goes into determining a social media company of the year?

Symplur says "in order for a company to have an effective social media presence it must know where the relevant conversations are taking place, the style of messaging that resonates among the participants, and most importantly who the influencers are within those networks of individuals." Symplur used a proprietary algorithm to determine whether a company was able to reach their audience from engaging key opinion leaders and their spheres of influence.

The five companies Symplur shortlisted for the award were AbbVie, Bayer, Boehringer, Novartis and Pfizer. Symplur says "from the 606 million healthcare tweets collected during 2015 we analyzed the conversations around the top 10 diseases with the highest mortality rates in the U.K.; Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer, Prostate Cancer, Stroke, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, COPD, Heart disease/failure, Lymphoma, Bowel Cancer and Pneumonia. Over 500 different hashtags were part of the dataset covering these 10 diseases. The pharma accounts with the highest influence and engagement were identified by the Healthcare Social Graph Score. We track many different types of pharma Twitter accounts; corporate accounts, disease specific, drug specific, geographically specific, and various communication campaign accounts which total over 500 accounts from dozens of companies."

From this, Symplur picked Boehringer as the Social Media Pharma Company of the Year.

On another Symplur front, Stanford Medicine X and Symplur have announced a joint initiative designed to spark scholarly research activity in healthcare social media. The Stanford Medicine X | Symplur Everyone Included™ Research Challenge seeks to encourage all health care stakeholders to collaborate on health care social media research. Submissions close on Friday, June 17, 2016 at 5 PM PST. Click here for details.