By Kevin Dunn, Grace Gosnear, and Liz Weir
Kevin Dunn, SVP, Client Services and Strategy · Grace Gosnear, Social Media Manager, LevLane · Liz Weir, SVP, Content, Social Media & PR, LevLane
The pharma and healthcare industry is sitting on one of the most powerful, most underutilized storytelling opportunities in modern marketing, and most brands are blowing it.
The pharmaceutical and healthcare social media market is projected to grow from, $14.7 billion in 2025 to $52.1 billion by 2035, a 13.5% annual growth rate, and brands are pouring money into it like never before. Scroll through the social feeds of most healthcare brands today, and you’ll find the same tired pattern of product announcements, clinical data drops, safety disclaimers, and stock photos of suspiciously happy families.
Most brands do care about their patients, but they haven’t figured out how to talk to them on social media, and the brands winning right now are the ones that have developed a voice that sounds like an actual human and not a legal department.
We’ve spent decades in this world. Liz develops the strategy and approach alongside Grace, who also builds and runs social media communities across industries and platforms every day, while Kevin manages the client relationships that keep it all moving in the right direction. Along the way we’ve noticed the best brands operate differently when it comes to social media, and those are the ones separating themselves from the pack.
Social Is Now Part of How People Search
Whereas in the past people began their research journey on Google, they are increasingly turning to social media to research symptoms and treatment options, and AI tools increasingly build their answers from what’s being said on social and community platforms. Marketers have started calling this answer engine optimization, or AEO, and generative engine optimization, GEO. Recent studies of AI citations consistently rank Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn among the sources those tools cite most. And since mid-2025, Google has been indexing public Instagram posts from professional accounts, so a brand’s feed can now show up in everyday search results.
A post that answers a real question doesn’t stop working the day it goes live. It becomes something search engines and AI tools can find, surface, and cite for months afterward. The educational content that performs on social is the same content that earns visibility in search.
If your brand isn’t part of those conversations, AI tools will build their answers from whoever is, and that information may not be accurate. Showing up consistently with clear, compliant, useful content is quickly becoming one of the best ways to make sure your story gets told correctly.
Stop Posting Like You’re Advertising.
Organic social algorithms are built to bury anything that resembles an ad. If it’s promoting something, you can almost guarantee your reach is suffering. Yes, even the big brands.
This is nothing new in our world. We see this play out in category after category, day in and day out. The brands that treat their channels as promotion outlets or a feed for announcing self-serving news get little reach, weak engagement, and audiences that quietly tune out. Because so few brands are willing to do anything outside the accepted norms, the category is WIDE OPEN for whoever is ready to take that leap.
We say to clients all the time that when it comes to organic social, your goal is to talk about what your followers want to hear about, not what you want to say. Patients, caregivers, and anyone trying to make sense of a diagnosis aren’t on Instagram to be sold to. They may be scared or confused, and they’re often online at odd hours of the night. The brand that is the first to present content that informs, educates, and answers their questions gains their trust and is more likely to be one they explore further.
The education gap in healthcare is enormous, and social media can close it, but only when brands stop thinking about selling above all else and lead with real value instead, with content like FAQs, plain-language explanations of complex diagnoses, caregiver stories, and practical guidance for navigating insurance and treatment decisions. That’s what people actually bookmark, share, and come back to.
The Platform Strategy Matters as Much as the Content
One of the most common mistakes in healthcare is treating every platform the same by posting identical content everywhere and wondering why it underperforms. Each platform has its own audience, algorithm, and preferences, and when those things are ignored, reach suffers.
A strong platform strategy is generally a tiered strategy. Your meta platforms, Instagram and Facebook, are your primary areas for building community. If you’re brave, you can add Facebook Groups for a proactive layer to give you what amounts to your own focus group, where you can bring value and gather real-time insights from your target audience. TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes authenticity over polish and can extend a brand’s reach from hyperlocal to national when done right. Adding influencer and organizational partnerships can extend that reach even further.
For B2B healthcare brands, LinkedIn is the primary channel to reach a professional audience with thought leadership, repositioning a brand from commodity to category expert. The channels change depending on the audience, but the discipline of choosing them on purpose doesn’t.
So instead of worrying about being on every platform, set out to know why you’re on each one and show up accordingly.
Compliance Doesn’t Have to Kill Creativity
The most common objection to bold social media strategies in pharma and healthcare is regulatory, and we acknowledge that it’s a real constraint. FDA and FTC requirements around fair balance, risk disclosure, and sponsored content are not optional. But the brands that navigate this best treat regulatory requirements as a creative challenge rather than a ceiling.
Disease awareness and education content, the kind that explains what a condition is, what to watch for, and how to push a provider for answers, can be fully compliant and still resonate with your audience. The emotional weight doesn’t come from product claims. It comes from real people telling their own stories.
For many, a diagnosis can come out of nowhere. It can be unfamiliar, frightening, even hard to pronounce at first. Patients and caregivers are scared and overwhelmed. A brand that meets them where they are, with plain-language information, real patient and caregiver stories, and a warm voice, is being genuinely helpful, not just good at marketing.
The most effective content follows the patient and caregiver journey from first suspicion through active treatment, answering the questions people are actually searching for at each stage. The goal is to earn trust before the brand asks anything of them.
Ambassador Programs vs. Influencer Campaigns
The pharma and healthcare industry has been slow to adopt influencer marketing, which is understandable, given the regulatory complexity. But the most sophisticated brands are moving past the hesitation and building something more durable, not to mention more effective: ambassador programs built on real patient, caregiver, and clinician voices.
An influencer campaign is transactional. A brand pays someone with a following to post something, and the audience sees it as an ad, because that’s really what it is. An ambassador program works the other way. You recruit people already living the story, train them on the guardrails, and let them say it in their own words.
The difference in authenticity is real, and audiences can feel it.
For rare disease brands especially, the ambassador approach is almost always superior. These communities are tight-knit and highly skeptical of inauthenticity. Someone who has lived through the diagnosis, speaking from experience to others facing the same thing, carries a credibility no paid spokesperson can replicate.
The compliance framework (training, disclosure, brand review, controlled distribution) doesn’t diminish that authenticity. It protects both the brand and the ambassador, ensuring the content that reaches the audience is accurate, safe, and genuinely useful.
Six Principles for Healthcare Brands Serious About Social
Across every category we work in, the brands building real communities tend to share the same habits:
- Show up where AI looks for answers. The clear, useful posts that help someone at midnight are the same ones AI tools quote back weeks later.
- Lead with education, not promotion. Algorithms bury promotion and reward usefulness, so show up to answer questions rather than to sell.
- Let real people tell real stories. Patients, caregivers, and clinicians carry credibility no brand voice can match, so build the infrastructure that lets them speak.
- Match content to platform, not the other way around. LinkedIn isn’t Instagram, and TikTok isn’t Facebook, so know who’s on the other end of each one.
- Marry the emotional and the educational. The clinical information has to reach people, but it goes further when it’s wrapped in a story they care about.
- Measure what matters beyond the feed. Likes and follower counts are easy to report, but they aren’t the point. What you’re really after is content that still turns up when someone searches months later, patients who understand their options, caregivers who feel equipped to act, and people who keep coming back.
The Bottom Line
Brands that use social to push product news will keep wondering why nothing lands. The ones that treat it like a conversation build an audience that trusts them, and in healthcare that trust is worth more than reach.
If you’re rethinking how your brand shows up on social, get in touch and we’ll walk you through what this looks like in practice.
About LevLane
LevLane Advertising is a full-service independent advertising agency headquartered in Philadelphia that has been building brands people love for nearly 40 years. The award-winning agency integrates traditional creative expertise with cutting-edge digital capabilities in its services, including search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), programmatic media, strategy, creative and branding, media and analytics, social media, content marketing, and public relations.
For more information about LevLane and its capabilities, connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.
