The Guide to Creating a Social Media Content Calendar for Healthcare Businesses

As a healthcare business, you may know by now just how much of your patient traffic is driven by social media platforms. To put it in perspective, if you are running successful social media medical marketing campaigns on the platforms you use, then you are driving 87.85% patient traffic to your medical website.

Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, you are able to form a connection with prospective and existing patients on social platforms by posting relevant medical content. This medical content educates them about medical conditions, treatments, and services and promotes your healthcare practice to them.

The point is, posting promotional content is an essential SMM strategy. This is why creating a social media medical content calendar will help you schedule your content creation and posting and allow you to attract prospective patients, attract patient engagement, and create patient leads for your online medical business.

What Is the Purpose of a Social Media Content Calendar?

Social media content calendars are exactly as their name suggests: they schedule your social media content postings. With a well-crafted social media content calendar, the process of researching, creating, and posting medical content becomes much more efficient. This also helps you maintain a regular posting schedule to maintain your patient engagement rates on your social media platforms. Some elements of a social media content calendar include:

• The type of medical content to be posted
• The goal of the medical content to be posted
• The writer that will create and edit the medical content
• The determined date and time of when your medical content will be posted
• The social platform and the target audience to which your medical content will be posted
• Any captions, infographics, tags, or links that will be included in the post

If you run a multi-platform SMM strategy, you alter your calendar accordingly. For example, if you post the same posts on your Facebook and Twitter Platforms, you can create a calendar to accommodate multi-posting.

Steps to Creating a Social Media Content Calendar

Every medical business will have different content needs; therefore, their content calendars will differ. However, it is the essential element that you need to get right to ensure that you deliver regular postings to your patient base on your social media platforms. Here are the steps you follow to create a successful social media content calendar:

1. Choose The Platforms for Content Posting

Before creating a social media content calendar, it is important to determine the platforms you want to post on. For best results, you can do an analysis on all the social media platforms you use to see which ones have the most patient engagement rates and which ones have the least so you can create a prioritized content strategy accordingly.

2. Decide The Type of Medical Content Will Resonate Best with Each Audience

Before you publish your medical content on social media, you must conduct some data analysis. Review your past social posts and determine which ones resonated most with your patient base. For example, is it videos that perform the best for your Facebook page? Does your patient base engage more promotional blog-like posts? See which formats and content topics perform well with which social platform.

It is also important that you determine what goal you want your content to achieve. Decide whether it is traffic and clicks that are more important to your strategy or conversions and brand promotion. Once you’ve determined your goals, you can determine the type of content you’ll need to create to achieve them. For example, how-to posts do well for traffic and clicks, but product guides do well for increased patient engagement and conversions.

3. Determine How Often Should You Post

Low brand recognition and disengagement from your patient base is a result of not posting enough. Your social media strategy depends heavily on how often you post on your social platforms. You also need to ensure that how and what you post is tailored to your patients’ preferences and the social networks they use. Below are the ideal content posting frequencies that you can apply to your content calendar:

• Instagram: 1-2 times a day.
• Facebook: 1-2 times a day. 
• LinkedIn: 1 time a day, 20 posts per month.
• Twitter: 2-3 times a day.

4. Choose The Best Time to Post

Hootsuite recommends posting on social media at 10:00 AM on Thursdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You can use these posting times if you don’t have audience insights or past posting data to work with.

As your patient base on your social platforms grows, you can change and shift your social  media content calendar to accommodate the specific behaviors of your patient base. For instance, if your patient base has a bigger demographic of 30-50 year olds, you may find the best time to post between 9:00-11:00 AM, which is typically the start of a workday.

5. Select The Best Social Media Content Calendar Tool For You

With your posting scheduled and out of the way, you can now complete your calendar. The last essential element in your content calendar is a planning and posting tool. Here are some well-known content calendars you can choose from, depending on your needs:

Trello

When it comes to task management and customizable features, Trello is a great content calendar tool to use. You can use its customizable lists and cards to brainstorm content ideas with your writers, approve outlines, schedule your postings, and track the progress of every post before it’s published. This way, you can monitor your campaign’s progress.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite has a planner tool that you can use to create individual content campaigns, determine any posting gaps, brainstorm with your content team, and approve every post before publishing. It also has a built-in Composer tool that shows different content formats designed for the social media platform you are creating your calendar for. This helps in relevant content creation and better patient engagement rates on your posts.

HubSpot’s Template for Excel

While Excel is technically the first program you could use to create lists, planners, and schedules, some people don’t find it relevant anymore. However, Hubspot has released an Excel content calendar template that you can download for free and use to plan and schedule your content. This template has pre-designed lists and sections that make for a great social media content calendar that you edit and share with the rest of your team to keep posting regular content on your social networks.

Being Well-Planned with Your Medical Content

Creating a result-driven social media content calendar is hard. Simply because you are not creating and posting medical content just for the sake of publishing content. Your every post carries a particular goal to accomplish; may it be increasing patient engagement, promoting your latest medical service, or building your reputation as an authority in your field.

Once you have created a social media content calendar, it is essential that you experiment with it. Compare the results at the end of the month to see which post accomplished its goal the best so you continue creating successful medical content. You can contact us at DocMarketo to build credibility and reach the right patients to grow your medical practice.