More Canadians search for medical or health-related info vs. Use social networking sites
According to a new report posted by Statistics Canada (“Individual Internet use and E-Commerce, 2010“), 64% of Canadian internet users search for medical or health-related information vs, 58% who use social networking sites. In fact, only 33% of Canadian internet users play online games, and only 19% are contribute content or participating in discussion groups (e.g., blogging, message boards, posting images)
Unfortunately, the online activities are not broken down by demographics.
The report clearly states that one cannot compare data from previous reports to this most recent one because the methodology and questions for both are somewhat different. However, I cannot resist but post some of the stats from the 2009 report. Compare the 2010 and 2009 data at your own risk:
Health searches on the Internet (from the data collected 2009):
- Searching for health information online reported by 70% of home users
- 74% of women used the Internet to search for information about health or medical conditions, while 66% of men did so
consumers
The 2010 online activity for both health information search and social networking is quite high. Moreover, search engines are taking social media more and more into consideration when ranking webpages.
Isn’t it time for all healthcare organizations and pharma companies to pay closer attention to their online activities in order to respond to the needs of Canadian consumers? Leave your comments on this topic below.
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2 responses to “More Canadians search for medical or health-related info vs. Use social networking sites”
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[...] blog post, I read a twitter message about this same Stats Can report that sent me to this report by Marketing4Health.ca. The post has a slightly different response to the findings than I did, but we both note the [...]
Hi there,
Good post.
While I definitely agree that big pharma should focus on improving their social media channels with patients and start listening to what the public has to say, I think there’s something missing here: the aggregated voice of the patient. And this is something that certain web-based tools specialize in: check out a relatively new site named http://www.treato.com: what it does is aggregate and analyze millions of online posts portraying the personal experiences of countless patients, and indexing this pool of knowledge by frequent side effects and drug switching patterns.
At the end of the day, I would argue that the power of a group of faceless consumers in recommending a product based on their own personal experience is equally valuable in the healthcare industry and in general online shopping categories.
Would to agree with that?
Haggai