Being a pharmaceutical on social media is hard, as no one really wants to engage with a flu medicine on Twitter. We needed to launch the Med-Lemon twitter account with no media budget.

Instead of using normal content plans, we decided to get consumers to advocate the brand and its benefits on our behalf (which also helps seeing as legally we aren't allowed to even do that).

Using the insight that consumers tweet when they aren't feeling well, we created a campaign where we selected sick consumers based on their tweets and got them to naturally push our campaign to their peers.

Using social listening tools, we found all tweets in South Africa containing key words relating to flu and flu symptoms. Twice a day we would evaluate all tweets from sick consumers and ranked them in order of followers, creative opportunity and propensity to retweet.

Once the top candidates were selected, we investigated their social profiles in order to find the most contextually relevant opportunity to them. Each tweet was then individually crafted (from recording songs for sick musicians, to even hand delivering chocolate to one heart broken and sick consumer).

These were then sent past legal and regulatory and tweeted out within 5-6 hours of the originating tweet. None of the tweets contained any call to action and we only relied on the creativity to get the required retweet to hit our objectives.

Our 124 tweet responses to individuals only; ended up reaching 956 322 consumers via retweets with R0 media driving it, all the while endorsing our product which we could not do ourselves.

The tweets were retweeted a total of 265 times which gave us a total engagement rate of 166% on the content created. Each piece was carefully crafted to stay in our legal boundaries but engaged creatively with our sick consumers in order to make them feel better and ultimately retweet it to their followers.