Weighing Ozempic's Pinterest Presence

Using social listening data to see what the market thinks about new weight loss drugs

Content warning: This brief mentions suicide and weight-related topics. If you are or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis hotline by dialing 988.

A new medication emerges

A reliable weight loss drug has tantalized medical researchers for decades. Doctors and dieticians have relegated weight loss to personal behavior and decision-making. However, that could be changing just within the last several months. Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, in their pursuit of diabetes medication, discovered an unintentional side effect for their medication Ozempic - weight loss. People taking Ozempic lose 15-20% of their body weight without the previously needed dieting and exercise.

Correspondingly, Ozempic has exploded on social media over the last three months. While the Food and Drug Administration approved Ozempic in 2017, post volume grew by 3,404% over the last three years as the drug’s weight loss properties became more apparent. High-influence accounts like Hollywood celebrities and news outlets have fueled much of this post volume growth. Unlike other trends we've looked at before, this post volume growth has been steady and shows no signs of slowing. We'll take you through our indicators and demographics of who's been talking about Ozempic online and let you know the warning signs we see about the drug.

Social conversation situated between diabetes and weight loss

First, we'll take a look at where the Ozempic conversation sits. To do this, we'll use a custom Venn diagram visualization to show the size and overlap over a conversation. We can do this using set theory - specifically isolating diabetes, weight loss, Ozempic discussions, and the five other intersections. You'll notice that diabetes and weight loss are massive compared with the Ozempic conversation. We collected 8 million posts about diabetes and 4.5 million about weight loss over the last three years. However, Ozempic, even though it's supposed to be a diabetes drug, has nearly as many posts that mention weight loss as diabetes. This conversational distribution follows a similar pattern to the one we saw with Viagra. Although its original purpose was to reduce hypertension and chest pain, it has morphed into a drug designed to combat erectile dysfunction.

Ozempic’s huge positivity growth

Driving that surge in post volume has been a surge of positivity, specifically in the context of weight loss. Before Ozempic's widespread recognition, people with diabetes frequently talked about it. This audience context explains the sharply negative sentiment. Diabetes is hardly a pleasant experience, with harsh symptoms like excessive thirst, swollen feet, blurry vision, and amputation risk. However, as Ozempic became more widely known as a potential cure for weight loss, Infegy Atlas detected an 11,437% increase in positive documents around the drug and a 1,362% increase in positive documents around Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that invented Ozempic. While negative post volume has grown as well, it has grown at less than half the rate of the growth of the positive and neutral documents.

However, despite this surge in positivity from April through June, we've detected a resurgent negative conversation from July through August. We'll now dive into what's causing this negative surge.

Pinterest as a channel of growth

Now that we've detected a positive surge of attention, we wanted to determine where that volume originated. Twitter is the leading source of post volume about Ozempic. Twitter's lead makes sense: Twitter typically covers breaking news topics and hot takes. Ozempic has been all over the news over the last few months. Pinterest's placement is surprising. Ozempic post volume on the platform has grown 1,600% since May 2023.

Diving into that conversation, we found Pinterest topics around dieting and weight loss for women going on Ozempic. Much of the conversation involves Pinterest’s characteristic how-tos, specifically around the Ozempic diet. Traditionally, Pinterest is a female-led, positive platform. We detected that women authors made up 80% of all Pinterest volume we collected during that time, and those posts had a whopping 94% positivity rate.

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