There‘s been a good deal written on-line the last few days about changes to Facebook’s policy on commenting practices and how those changes are affecting pages associated with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. (See San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post stories).
As you know, Johnson & Johnson is a widely decentralized business with more than 250 companies around the world in consumer health care products, medical devices and diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals. We have at least 60 Facebook pages associated with our businesses and brands, and the vast majority of our pages were not impacted by the Facebook policy change because they already had commenting enabled. For example, our corporate page has always allowed commenting (https://www.facebook.com/jnj) and has a clear policy on how we manage our page and comments (see Info and Description).
That being said, Facebook’s new policy has impacted a few group pages across our businesses, primarily a few unbranded pharmaceutical pages about certain disease states noted in the media. In these cases, decisions to close communities were difficult, but necessary, and they were communicated to those pages’ followers. The new policy altered functionality in ways that changed the ability to sponsor some pages due to regulatory, legal and other considerations.
I wanted to just clarify the impact the policy changes have had – and more importantly have not had – regarding our presence on Facebook. Staying true to our view of social media, we will continue to embrace its use and explore new ways to support the communities we serve. Thanks.