Social Media Management & Design

Project Synopsis

Building trust in patients and partners by giving life to PicnicHealth’s social media presence. Developed a social strategy, established a content calendar, and designed graphics and content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.

Growth Marketing Team

  • Joanne L. (Marketing Specialist)

  • Megan B. (Marketing Manager)

Community Team

  • Brittany D. (Community Partnerships Manager)

  • Ashanthi D. (Advocacy Partnership Manager)

  • Ashley F. (Community Partnerships Manager)

Context & Problem

PicnicHealth offers an opportunity for patients to better navigate their health by allowing them to have access to a complete medical timeline of their medical records. While any patient can join PicnicHealth, their target audience are patients living with rare or chronic diseases, as these are the patients who typically go to multiple providers and would find their platform the most helpful. These rare disease patients are also given the option to participate in research, by allowing researchers to have access to their medical records, for real-world data research. Because of the sensitive information that PicnicHealth manages, it’s vital for patients to trust the brand, and one of the ways that PicnicHealth can do that is by building a reputable social media presence.

While we were not using this channel to drive conversion, we believed that it was still important for us to invest in this channel. By utilizing our social media channels, it allows us to connect with advocacy organizations and also keep patients feeling engaged with the brand. While channel growth would not be a KPI for this project, we still wanted to follow soft indicators such as patient commentary and user research as a guide for “success”.

If you were to take a look at PicnicHealth’s Instagram or Facebook 3 years ago, they had very little to almost no social media presence. There was no clear brand design, no tone of voice, using low-quality graphics, and an inconsistent posting schedule. Comments on our ads were flooded with people saying PicnicHealth was a scam, fake company, and that they were just trying to steal patient data. But with a social media presence like this, you can imagine why a patient or partner may not initially trust PicnicHealth as a brand.

Goal

Step 2: Ideate

Team

Step 1: Empathize + Define

With the need to essentially build PicnicHealth’s social media account from the ground up, the first step was to do some research. We needed to see what our weaknesses were, what type of content does our audience want to see, and then see what our competitors were doing. By doing this, we gained insight into what type of content would and wouldn’t do well, based on user engagement.

It’s clear that we had several weak points in our social media strategy. When it came to what we were posting, there wasn’t much depth in the majority of what we posted. Every post felt like the same post over and over again, which was asking followers to join studies that PicnicHealth was currently recruiting for. It was clear that we needed to diversify our social content.

In terms of organization and posting consistency, we decided that the best solution would be to create a proper social media calendar, which we created through Airtable. By creating this calendar, it would be easier for us to stay organized as a team and visualize any gaps we had throughout the months.

Now, how do we fill up our calendar? What content do patients want to see? The best way to answer this question was to partner up with our community team. This team managed relationships with patient advocates and advocacy organizations, and because they worked so closely with these patients and patient communities, they were the best people to collaborate and brainstorm with. This team had access to incredibly valuable patient insights such as FAQs from patient ambassadors and advocacy organizations that they had collected over time, so using these would significantly strengthen our social media strategy.

By collaborating with the community team and using the research that I had done, we decided that creating content that surrounded the patient experience would be the best direction to go. In addition to patient-centric content, we decided that it would also be beneficial to create posts about our company to further build trust.

Step 3: Prototype

Because we believed that patient-centric content would be what would help build trust in our brand the most, this is what we wanted our main focus to be on. This included content where we would work with patient advocates, informational posts about the different conditions that we recruited for, resources, and awareness days. We already had an ambassador program called “Change Champions” where we worked with patient advocates to bring awareness to their conditions and our studies. By working with this community, we’re able to collaborate and collect quotes, videos, and other content that we could use to develop posts. Some of the content that we created with them was around awareness days/months, blog promotions, patient webinar promotions, day-in-the-life content, and tips around managing conditions.

For posts about PicnicHealth, we created event promotions, company updates, and team member highlights. By posting about what was going on in the company and putting a face to the people who are working behind the scenes, we hope that this would help further build brand trust and recognition.

When it came to designing the posts, I concluded that it was likely that there would be posts that we were likely to duplicate frequently, such as webinars, partner announcements, or blog posts. Because of that, I created templates that we could use when those posts did come up. For all our other posts, I would just create them as needed.

Since the start of this project, PicnicHealth now has a consistent posting schedule where posts are made at least once a week. The contents of each channel are also more diverse, featuring videos and carousels which were never used before, and we also now have a clear PicnicHealth branded style. Because of this, we have been able to grow our Instagram to over 1,000 followers (~300% increase from when we started), and received praise from new team members, shown below:

Impact

Process

Team

What I Did

  • Social Media Strategy

  • Copywriting

  • Content Creation

  • Graphic Design

  • Scheduling

Right

Left

Step 4: Test + Implement

We tested this content by posting at least twice a week for the next few months and kept track of engagement as a success metric (likes, shares, comments, etc.), which was all done through Sprout Social. After a few months of testing, we found that posts that use photos of real patients and the PicnicHealth team performed the best. This included team highlights, advocacy event recaps, and patient advocate content (that used patient photos). The posts that didn’t seem to perform as well were ones where we used illustrations or just had plain text or quotes.

From our testing, we were able to establish a consistent posting schedule along with guidelines for content creation. In order to maintain a consistent social media presence, we’d make sure that we have social posts on the calendar for at least a month out, with a minimum of one post each week.

Challenges

Because we did not consider this to be a recruitment channel, we were not able to put in any money to this project when we first started. This mean we had to utilize the tools that we already had at our disposal before it came to a time where we could pay for promotions and engagement. These tools included our Change Champion program, Figma, and Asana.

Having to work with limited resources was also a huge challenge. Being on a small marketing team where each person owned their own individual channels and projects created very limited resources for this. Design is also something that I had no previous experience with, and being the only person who was available to take up this project meant having to also learn how to use new programs that I had no previous experience with before, such as Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud Applications, Sprout Social.

Sourcing content was another challenge. Because of the rarity of the conditions that we worked with, it’s difficult to find new patient ambassadors to work with who were available to create content for us. Those who we did work with were often busy managing their conditions on top of their everyday lives, so getting into contact with these individuals became difficult to do at times. This would cause posts to have to be pushed or moved around on the calendar. This made us realize that if we needed content, we had to request them much further ahead of time, meaning a month or more ahead, versus our previous assumption of a week or two.

As time went on, I discovered a format that we were not utilizing was short-form video content. Because this format has recently ramped up in popularity, I took the initiative and created a TikTok strategy.

Since TikTok was a platform that focused on short-form video content, I imagined that the strategy would be much different than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, I still wanted to continue creating patient-centric content. So for TikTok, I decided to create and post clips of our ChangeChampions talking about themselves, their condition, and tips that they had to share. We also had video content of our own team members discussing their roles, different ways to use PicnicHealth, and why a patient should join PicnicHealth, so I was also able to utilize those clips for TikTok. However, when I tested this content, it did not do as well as I hoped. Because content on TikTok is typically light-hearted and humorous, this wasn’t too much of a surprise since the videos I posted weren’t typically what would perform well on TikTok. Because of this, I decided to take a different approach for TikTok and utilize trends, templates, and audios that were popular and incorporate them into relevant clips that would also be more light-hearted and humorous. After a few months of testing, I saw a significant increase in views and engagement.

Iterations

Additional Examples