12 Creative Tips for Social Media Health Campaigns

On social media, the old saying “content is king” is more true than ever. For organizations running health campaigns there, the right content can improve lives, and the wrong content is at best a waste of time and money. At worst, badly conceived content or a mismanaged campaign can reduce people’s motivation to act and improve their health or wellbeing.

There are things you can do to improve your odds. A team with the right cultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes matters more than almost anything else. But even the most talented team will fail when the project gets stuck in cumbersome processes that leave no room for 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. Our work has taught us that no rule, shortcut, or one-size-fits-all strategy guarantees a campaign’s success. You also don’t need to be a creative genius or have a huge budget to improve 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 as good without an agency as with one.

Let Behavior Science Guide You: Many global health campaigns try to change behavior so that people live longer, healthier lives. Building your campaign on a behavior change model keeps your creative tied to your goals. A behavior model greatly increases your chance of success, and it can shape your measurement and evaluation too.

Stay Curious and Nimble: Our team values rapid testing, learning, and iteration above everything else. On social media you can test everything and learn quickly, and that is the medium’s biggest advantage. We have learned again and again that the fastest path to success runs through failure. So we work to build curiosity, and the habit of rapid testing, learning, and iteration, into every phase of every project we support.

Quantity First: Every new piece of content has a cost, and 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.” For expensive formats like video or long animations, the opportunity cost of creative development can be enormous. High-cost content also often performs no better than low-cost content, and sometimes worse. That’s why we put quantity first. We would much rather have 25 cheap pieces of content that our creators thought up in the shower and threw together over breakfast cereal than one or two expensive videos that were painstakingly planned and scripted. Putting too much time and money into too few pieces of creative stakes the whole campaign on a handful of posts.

Organic-First Content: Social media runs on people. Even if your content will go out as targeted ads, make things people want to respond to and share with friends and family. As you design content, think as hard about the friends and family members your audience might share it with as about the audience itself.

Love Results, Not Ideas: Every so often, all of us believe we know what will work. At Upswell, we’ve seen enough content over the years to have some pattern recognition for what may or may not work on social media. So we check our assumptions by placing little bets on which content will succeed and which will fail, and we are regularly proven wrong. Have conviction about the content you make, but hold final judgment on a piece of content until you see how your target audience responds to it. And don’t save your love for the content that performs best. Every piece of creative that teaches you something speeds your path to a successful project.

Engage Your Audience: Not all engagement is equal. On platforms like Facebook, simply letting a video play in the newsfeed often counts as engagement. But someone passively watching a video has far less effect than someone leaving a comment or sharing your content with a friend. Paying to put unengaging content in your audience’s newsfeed is less likely to produce measurable impact than content that moves them to take some kind of action. Keep looking for ways to make your content draw reactions, shares, and comments.

Focus on Shareability: Sharing is probably the most powerful form of engagement on social media. People share content for three main reasons:

1. They think the content will be useful to the people they share it with

2. They want to show their friends something about themselves (to define themselves through what they share)

3. They believe the content can make a difference

At Upswell, we are a bit obsessed with shareability. When someone shares your content, it reaches more of the right people, and it arrives through a messenger they trust. Research has shown that people trust information from their friends more than most other sources. So shared content extends your reach and makes your message more effective at the same time.

Not all effective content gets shared, and not all shareable content moves people toward your goal. Many things affect whether content gets shared, and some are well outside your control. For instance, some audiences share what they find on social media more than others do. Whether or not a given person shares your content, you still gain from making content you believe your audience would want to share if given the chance.

Spark Conversations: We care just as much about starting meaningful conversations and replying to the people who comment. Social strategies, whether they run on social media or in the physical world, are powered by real conversations. On social media, those conversations happen between you and your audience in the comments on your posts. They also happen out of your view, when people share your content with a friend and add a note. Content that starts a meaningful conversation about your topic is much more likely to produce measurable results for your campaign.

Aim at the Heart, Not the Head: One of the most common mistakes we see is creators putting all their energy into the accuracy and clarity of the message and ignoring how people feel. The traditional public service announcement (PSA) is the classic example. Often you don’t even need to tell people exactly what to do if you can make them feel it. Instead of telling people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, a heartfelt story about an unvaccinated person struggling with long COVID may do more for your audience’s motivation to protect themselves and their friends than a traditional PSA-style message would.

Think Local, Create Local: Few things matter more than reaching your audience in their own language and context, in ways that connect with them. That often means creating content in more than one language, and it almost always means your audience should see themselves in your creative. That’s why Upswell works with local partners on every project we take on.

Be Audience Intentional: Whatever your project’s end goal, make sure you are not reinforcing harmful norms or inequities. Where we can, we also have a responsibility to promote equity, and we work hard not to expose any group to additional risk through what we do. Being intentional also makes you more likely to meet the needs of different people in your audience. The barriers and motivations facing women, men, or trans people often differ, sometimes slightly and sometimes greatly. Gender is not the only thing to keep in mind, but here is a wonderful resource for thinking through gender equity in social media campaigns.

About Upswell: We believe social media and social strategies can help create a healthier, more just, and more joyful world. Our mission is to help organizations design and run social strategies that amplify their work and help them reach their program goals.