12 Creative Tips for Social Media Health Campaigns
The old saying “content is king” has never been more true than it is today on social media. For organizations running health campaigns on social media, the right content can improve lives while the wrong content is at best just a waste of time and money. Poorly conceived content or mismanaged social media campaigns can actually reduce people’s motivation to take action and improve their health or wellbeing.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to increase the likelihood of driving a positive impact. The value of a team with the proper cultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes can’t be overstated. But even the most talented teams will fail to drive impact when projects get bogged down by cumbersome processes that stifle rapid testing and learning.
The Upswell team has supported the rollout and analysis of hundreds of social media campaigns for public health around the world. If there is one thing that our work has taught us, it is that there are no hard and fast rules, no magic wands, or one-size-fits-all strategies guaranteed to make your campaign successful. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a creative genius or have a huge budget to drive positive health outcomes on social media. With a little time, a few basic creative skills, and a commitment to testing and learning, your chances of success are just as high without the help of an agency as they are with one.
Let Behavior Science Guide You: Many global health campaigns aim to change behavior to help people live longer and healthier lives. Building your campaign on top of a behavior change model helps ensure your creative stays aligned with your goals. Not only do behavior models greatly increase your chance of success, but they can also inform your measurement and evaluation.
Stay Curious and Nimble: If there is one thing our team has learned to value above all, it is rapid testing, learning, and iteration. The superpower of social media is that you can test everything and learn quickly. We have learned repeatedly that the fastest path to success goes directly through failure. We work hard to foster a culture of curiosity and the practice of rapid testing, learning, and iteration in every phase of every project we support.
Quantity First: There are costs associated with creating every new piece of content. But one of the highest costs is often overlooked. The Oxford Dictionary defines opportunity cost as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” The opportunity cost associated with creative development can be tremendous for high production-cost creative such as video or lengthy animations. Add to this the fact that high-cost content often fails to perform better than (or even as well as) low-cost content, and you can understand our quantity-first approach to creative. Simply put, we would much rather have 25 low-production-cost pieces of content that our creators have thought up while in the shower and thrown together while eating cereal in the morning than 1 or 2 high-cost videos that were painstakingly planned out and scripted. In a way, investing too much time and money into too few pieces of creative is the modern-day version of putting all your eggs (or at least too many eggs) in one basket.
Organic-first Content: Never lose sight of the fact that the power of social begins and ends with people. Even if your content will be delivered via targeted ads, aim to create things people want to respond to and share with friends and family. As you design content, it is equally important to think about your end audience as it is to think about the friends and family members with whom they might share it.
Love Results, Not Ideas: We all fall into the trap of believing we know what will work from time to time. At Upswell, we have seen enough content over the years to believe we have developed a bit of pattern recognition for what may or may not work on social media. Yet we make a game of checking our assumptions by placing little bets on which content we believe will succeed and which will fail. We are regularly humbled and proven wrong. We encourage you to have conviction about the content you are producing but hold final judgment of an idea on a specific piece of content until you see how our target audience responds to it. Oh, and don’t reserve your love only for the content that performs best. Every piece of creative that teaches you something is worthy of love! After all, every piece of content that teaches you something helps speed your path to a successful project outcome.
Engage your Audience: You know that engagement is important on social media. But all engagement is not equal. Simply letting a video play while in the newsfeed on platforms like Facebook is often counted as engagement. But passively watching a video is not nearly as impactful as when a person leaves a comment or shares your content with a friend. Paying to get unengaging content into your audience’s newsfeed is less likely to result in measurable impact compared to getting content that inspires them to take some kind of action. Never stop looking for ways to make your content spark reactions, shares, and comments.
Focus on Sharability: Speaking of engagement, let’s talk about sharability as it is very likely the most powerful form of engagement on social media. There are three primary reasons people share content on social media:
Because they think the content will be of value to the people they are sharing it with
To show their friends something about themself (to define themself through the content they share)
Because they believe the content can make a real difference
At Upswell, we are a bit obsessed with sharability for some very good reasons. First, When a person shares your content, not only does it help reach more of the right people, it injects a trusted messenger into the mix. Research has shown that people trust information from their friends more than most other sources. In other words, shared content helps you reach more of the right people while simultaneously increasing your message's effectiveness. That’s a double win!
Not all effective content will get shared, and not all shareable content will move the dial toward your intended goal. Many variables feed into whether content gets shared; some are well outside your control. For instance, sharing content found on social media is more common among some audiences than others. Whether or not a person does share your content, there are always advantages to focusing on creating content that you believe your audience would want to share if given the opportunity.
Spark Conversations: If Upswell is obsessed with sharability, then sparking meaningful conversations (and engaging with people who comment) is our passion. After all, social strategies (whether implemented on social media or in the physical world) are powered by real-life conversations. On social media, discussions can take place between you and your audience directly in the comments section of your posts. They can also take place out of your view when people share your content with a friend along with a note. Content that sparks meaningful conversation about your topic is much more likely to lead to measurable results for your campaign.
Aim at the Heart, Not the Head: One of the most common mistakes we see creators make is focusing all of their energy on the accuracy and clarity of the message while ignoring people's feelings. In many ways, the traditional PSA is the archetype of this type of content. Often, you may not even need to tell people precisely what you want them to do if you can make them feel it. For example, instead of telling people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, sharing a heartfelt story about an unvaccinated person struggling with long COVID may have a stronger impact on your audience’s motivation to take action in order to protect themselves and their friends than would a traditional PSA style message.
Think Local, Create Local: There are few things more important than meeting your audience where they are and in ways that connect with them. This often means creating content in more than one language and almost always means your audience is reflected in your creative. This is why Upswell always works with local partners on every project we undertake.
Be Audience Intentional: No matter what the end goal of your project is, it is always important to ensure that you are not reinforcing harmful norms or inequities. When possible, we also have a responsibility to promote equity and work hard to avoid exposing any population to additional risks through our actions. Being intentional also increases your chances of addressing the unique needs of different members of your audience. For instance, the barriers and motivational factors facing women, men, or trans populations are often slightly or even greatly different. Being audience intentional helps ensure that you are addressing the unique needs of the people you are working to influence and serve. Although gender is not the only thing to keep in mind, here is a wonderful resource for thinking through gender equity in social media campaigns.
About Upswell: At Upswell, we believe in the potential of social media and social strategies to help create a healthier, more just, and joyful world. Our mission is to help organizations develop and implement social strategies that amplify their work and help them reach their programmatic goals.