by Ar­salan Arif

Like many of you, I have a com­pli­cat­ed re­la­tion­ship with Twit­ter. I don’t feel good at it, but here I am ob­sess­ing over it. I re­sent feel­ing like I need to be good at it. That’s a bad way to feel about a re­la­tion­ship you’ve been in for sev­en years.

Your friends have more friends than you do — this is the rub of so­cial net­work­ing. There isn’t a pro­fes­sion­al I know who is proud of the small size of their Rolodex. It’s no won­der so many in bio­phar­ma join Twit­ter on­ly to aban­don it af­ter a few tweets. The de­fault state of their new ac­count ad­ver­tis­es to the world that no­body at all fol­lows what you have to say. That doesn’t feel good ei­ther.

If you work in­side bio­phar­ma, I’ll ad­mit there’s not much rea­son for you to post to Twit­ter. Yes, there are ex­cep­tions and many en­joy a rich­er ca­reer as a re­sult. But it’s not true for a big ma­jor­i­ty. Most knowl­edge in bio­phar­ma is held in the minds and ex­pe­ri­ences of peo­ple and com­pa­nies. These are not shared in pub­lic.

The beau­ty of Twit­ter is that you don’t have to say any­thing at all.

Read-on­ly Twit­ter

The dirty se­cret of Twit­ter is that it’s de­pen­dent on jour­nal­ists and pro­fes­sion­al con­tent-cre­ators. We go to Face­book to see time­lines of our friends and fam­i­ly. LinkedIn time­lines on­ly mat­ter if you’re on a job hunt or re­cruit­ing peo­ple your­self.

Se­ri­ous news hounds turn to Twit­ter be­cause it’s the on­ly se­ri­ous place to craft a hard news time­line. And it turns out “read-on­ly Twit­ter” is quite an amaz­ing prod­uct. When you tune in­to the con­ver­sa­tions of oth­ers, you learn things you didn’t know you need­ed to know.

Jour­nal­ists, brands, and bots all rush to post con­tent the mo­ment it’s fit for con­sump­tion. Some links have legs, oth­ers don’t. It’s an op­er­at­ing sys­tem for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of news and the meta-com­men­tary that fol­lows. This is the top of the pub­lic in­fo pyra­mid. From here these things fil­ter down­stream to the 80% of the in­dus­try who have no re­la­tion­ship with Twit­ter.

Plug­ging your ear in­to the top of this nerve cen­ter gets you clos­er and faster to this in­for­ma­tion. Whether this in­for­ma­tion is good or bad, that’s for you to de­cide. Like the tele­phone game, where you tell some­one some­thing and it changes down­stream, your in­for­ma­tion is pur­er the clos­er it was to the sig­nal. It’s with­out the col­or. No ana­log degra­da­tion.

Too much noise

Hav­ing asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion is a huge ad­van­tage in busi­ness, right? You know some­thing some­body else doesn’t, and they don’t have ac­cess to those bit of in­fo. This is how it worked in 1990.

In 2016 you can pos­sess asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion that’s freely avail­able to all, but was lost in the dig­i­tal ether of tweets, press re­leas­es, al­go­spam, and Na­tive Ӓd­ver­tis­ing. In­for­ma­tion is eas­i­ly buried in the con­tent swamp. You just can’t see it all.

Now there’s plen­ty of firms who’ll charge a $10,000 month­ly re­tain­er to sift through these tweets, trav­el ob­scure parts of the web, trav­el be­hind the pay­walls, send you a sum­ma­ry, make sure things don’t fall through the cracks. A few lucky bio­phar­ma ex­ec­u­tives en­joy these perks.

What if you’re brand new to bio­phar­ma? How about if you’re a sea­soned vet but just new to Twit­ter? How do you know who to fol­low? Twit­ter for all in­tents and pur­pos­es is a con­sumer brand. De­spite it be­ing a rich, im­me­di­ate source of in­for­ma­tion for drug de­vel­op­ers, Twit­ter the com­pa­ny has no prod­ucts to on­board such a niche au­di­ence.

We love Twit­ter at End­points and want more peo­ple in bio­phar­ma to en­joy the ben­e­fits of it — even as a pro­fes­sion­al lurk­er.

In­tro­duc­ing Mar­co, our news­bot

Last Au­gust we qui­et­ly launched our vi­ral news­bot@endpts. We re­cent­ly named it Mar­co — con­stant­ly ex­plor­ing BioTwit­ter.

It’s job is to:

It’s that last part that forms the ba­sis of this spe­cial re­port: who was the first per­son to re­port this news?

Mar­co has been read­ing BioTwit­ter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for al­most a a year now. Over this time we can ag­gre­gate the hat tips Mar­co doled out and come up with this ex­act list.

We guar­an­tee if you fol­low a healthy seg­ment of this list — you’re plugged in­to to heart of the link econ­o­my on BioTwit­ter.

What this list is not

Any­time you rank your friends and col­leagues there’s bound to be hard feel­ings. So let me state for the record:

Biotech Twit­ter cit­i­zens most fre­quent­ly cred­it­ed with post­ing trend­ing links first