Social media has proven to be far more than a fad in the healthcare industry. A cornerstone of any effective healthcare marketing strategy, it provides an important way of providing patient education. Social media platforms also allow you to deliver timely notices and patient tips to your followers.

Seasonal health content help healthcare professionals guide their patients’ decision-making process as the seasons change. Simple reminders to use sunscreen or get a flu shot can help connect with current and future patients.

How Seasonal Health Content Creates Valuable Connections

Seasonal health content is powerful because it connects with patients’ immediate concerns. It arrives when adapting to seasonal changes is prominent in their minds, drawing their attention. These social media posts will provide valuable information for them, which is important for building trust. We will explore the impact of season health content, and how you can effectively leverage it for your marketing goals.

This article looks at how the health system can use seasonal health content. It covers finding trends, creating engaging posts, and measuring long-term success. This helps ensure steady growth. A few elements are central to these kinds of posts:

• Seasonally Relevant Content: Your patient’s care needs change with the seasons, and your content needs to change. Reminders to hydrate in summer, avoid the flu in winter, and prepare for allergy season in spring are paramount. You establish yourself as an authority by posting seasonal health content with valuable advice at appropriate times.
• Relevance of Content: Your content should be relevant to the care you provide. Dermatologists can focus on dry skin in winter and sunscreen in summer. Dentists can discuss avoiding tooth decay during the holidays and the risks of fruit juice in summer. Attuning your content to your followers’ needs creates a sense of reliability and proactiveness.
• Focus On Health Education: The content you share should include ways your patients can actively work to improve their health. Notifications about screenings and vaccinations help create an opportunity for engagement while reinforcing the importance of proactivity. These motivators will build and improve patient relations, even over social media.

These three concepts form the bedrock of effective seasonal content digital marketing in your social media channels. While they serve as a foundation, there are more building blocks to consider.

Staying Current With Seasonal Health Trends

We’ve already established that in every healthcare organization, patient’s health needs change with the passing of the seasons. However, it’s important not to get repetitive and to stay informed about the latest seasonal health concerns. 

Hydration during the summer is an expected topic; it remains relevant from year to year. While flu vaccinations are annual, the highest circulating flu strains vary. This is an opportunity to freshen up your seasonal content from year to year.

Similarly, seasonal health content can focus on issues that impact those returning to school during the Fall. The latest trends and new health risks that those attending school face always bear watching.

You can also keep track of awareness months, health news, and local community issues. In communities with a strong hunting culture, information about avoiding health issues associated with deer ticks is critical. Areas with prominent seasonal activities like skiing, hiking, and swimming can also benefit from targeted seasonal health content.

As always, the trends you post about should be directly relevant to your practice. Sticking to topics centered on the care you provide ensures your patients continue to view you as a credible source. No better way exists to do this than to ensure your suggestions are authentic and on-brand.

Additional tips for identifying seasonal trends:

• Check The National Health Observances Calendar: It lists important days, weeks, and months for different health causes.
• Monitor patient questions: Look for patterns in patient inquiries to identify what matters most during specific seasons.

Creating Content That Engages And Educates Your Patients

One challenge practices face when using seasonal health content is standing out from the competition. Your seasonal health content must be creative, visually engaging, and educational to make an impact. Most importantly, the information it contains must be actionable.

The visual presentation of your content is essential in capturing attention and driving interaction. Posting content that contains useful and engaging advice is important, but it won’t matter if they don’t click through. On social media, your window to grab that attention is exceedingly short. You can improve engagement by using eye-catching images, videos, or infographics in your posts.

Tips For Making Effective Seasonal Content:

• Visual Appeal: Use vibrant graphics, infographics, or short videos to capture attention quickly.
• Actionable Advice: Give clear, evidence-based steps that patients can take right away. For example, “How to prepare for allergy season.”

Striking While The Iron’s Hot: Effective Timing For Seasonal Content

Ensuring your seasonal health content makes an impact requires getting it out to your patients at the right time. Sending out winter health tips in March or how to avoid allergies in the Fall will take the punch out of your content. Instead of giving an impression of having value, it will make your practice seem out of touch at best. 

When you begin planning your social media marketing campaign, ensure that you have a well-planned content calendar. Your first step should be locating significant shifts in seasonal trends and important health events throughout the year. 

• Seasonal Trends: Looking at your past care records can show important patterns. This helps us understand when patients visit and what their concerns are. You can use these to indicate when to discuss certain seasonal health content and when these trends pass. For instance, mental health conditions such as SAD tend to spike in winter.
• Important Events: If you live in an area with recurring events and activities, these provide another opportunity. Country fairs are wonderful but have numerous health risks because of environmental exposure and large crowds. Similarly, opening skiing, hunting, or camping season comes with risks. Healthcare education on these topics can help your patients.

Finally, you’ll want to plan a reasonable posting schedule. Your followers find comfort in a reliably consistent posting schedule, but posting too often can also annoy them.

A delicate balance exists between “comfortingly active” and “spamming their feed.” Intermix seasonal posts with general healthcare content, even during the active season.

How To Know Your Seasonal Health Content Is Making An Impact

When you invest significant effort into your social media content, you want to know that it’s having an impact. Tracking how well your seasonal health posts perform is important. This helps you improve your marketing strategy for better results. 

Engagement Metrics That Indicate Success:

• Likes: Likes are the minimal sign of engagement. They often receive content that connects with them. They may find the post humorous, informative, or impactful. 
• Comments: A more meaningful level of engagement, comments are direct interaction with your followers. These can be posts thanking you for the content, their insight, or even angry posts. 
• Shares: This strong engagement shows that people find your post valuable. They want to share it with others who might also appreciate it. Many people consider this a form of “word-of-mouth” advertising, and it proves just as effective.
• High Engagement Rate: Posts that receive a lot of activity are a sign that your content is doing its work. Readers find it impactful, timely, and relevant to their interests or concerns.
• Click-Through Rates: One of the most important metrics for driving traffic to your site. CTR indicates that followers engage with your content and follow links to your site to learn more.

The ultimate goal of effective marketing with social media content is to convert followers to patients. If you’re experiencing a spike in vaccination appointments after a post about flu vaccines, your efforts are bearing fruit.

A Final Note On Common Mistakes With Seasonal Health Content

Seasonal health content is a powerful tool in your healthcare marketing toolbox. You’ll get the most benefit out of it if you avoid some common mistakes. These topics have been mentioned previously in the article, but we’ll recap them here:

• Irrelevant Content: Ensure your content is relevant to your patients’ concerns. This means staying on topic for your practice and posting the content in the correct season. Posting irrelevant content risks confusing your followers and diluting your brand.
• Inconsistent Posting: Patients prefer a steady posting schedule that keeps your practice in their minds. Steady, consistent posting is the best approach for a great patient experience.

A final comment: while sales-driven posts play an important role in marketing, you want to be careful with them. Advertisers constantly bombard social media users with ads; it’s important your seasonal health content doesn’t read like one.

Social media users tend to leave or silence profiles focused on sales-driven posts. The best balance is to provide valuable contact information and encourage them to use you for their care.

Social Media Experts Drive Engagement and Conversion

Social media marketing is more than just a part of your marketing efforts. It is an entire discipline that takes time and experience to utilize effectively. This is why many healthcare providers engage a team of social media experts to drive engagement and conversion with seasonal health content.

Optimized 360 is one of the leading healthcare marketing experts in the industry today. They’ve helped practices in the United States and beyond get the most from the social media marketing dollar. Collaborating with our team is the first step to creating your next success story. Contact our team to get the best results from your social media campaigns!