Let me guess you’re here for one of these reasons:

You don’t even know where to begin when it comes to social media.

You feel like you’re sharing great educational content, but all you hear is crickets.

You struggle to come up with content ideas and/or how you can connect with your audience.

You want to attract clients off of social media…but you seem to think it’s a big MYTH that it’s even possible.

If that’s you, then you are in the right place!

If you are a functional medicine or naturopathic physician looking for social media post ideas to… 

• Grow your following on IG

• Increase engagement

• Convert followers into clients

…

You need to have an intentional social media strategy…this includes both posts and stories!

Posting beautiful photos or posts full of educational content to your feed isn’t too hard. However, a proper strategy for your Instagram goes WAY beyond this.⁠

You need to be intentional about the TYPES of posts you’re sharing.

You need to be intentional about the WAY you’re presenting the content.

You need to be intentional about HOW you’re showing up on your stories.

(All of this will be covered in this post! In addition to how you can never run out of ideas!)

Social Media Posts Strategy

Riddle me this:

What’s the difference between an average post that gets a few likes to a GREAT post that gets shared over & over and goes viral?

It has to do with 2 things:

The content of the post and HOW the information is being presented.

Normally, I see health practitioners do great with the first part — you have a vast wealth of knowledge helping people transform their lives.

However, the second part is often the part that’s overlooked.

HOW you present information is incredibly important so that it has higher chances of going viral.

Viral posts = more eyeballs = more followers = more potential clients

Let’s first dive into the CONTENT of what types of posts you should be posting.

4 Types of Content

There are 4 main types of posts that you need to rotate through…and NO, they are not all educational!

1. Value
2. Personal
3. Inspiration
4. Salesy

VALUE

Most wellness entrepreneurs often excel in this category ;) These types of posts are a great way to showcase your knowledge on your specialty so future clients know that they can trust you on certain topics. People also love to see posts with actionable educational content — aka – they don’t want to know just the theory, they want to see how they can apply that knowledge to themselves.

PERSONAL POSTS

Your favorite clients are often a past version of yourself. (If they aren’t, that’s okay too!). The goal here is that people like to know that someone truly understands what they are going through. Yes, it may be difficult and an act of vulnerability to share these types of posts, but these ones are super important to gain rapport with your audience. More, now than ever, people are looking for a more personal connection with members of their health care team.

INSPIRATION POSTS

Often the biggest barrier to someone working with you is that they don’t believe that they can make the changes or that it will work for them. So here’s your chance to help them believe that YES, they can make those changes, improvements, etc. Inspiration based posts are meant to connect with your audience on an emotional level.

SALESY POSTS

You must promote yourself! If people don’t know what you offer, how are they going to take action? Your audience needs to know WHO you work with. People tend to imagine themselves working with you BEFORE they even reach out to you. It’s important to help that imagination process along.

Now that you know the types of posts to be posting, here comes perhaps the most important step: HOW you present the information.

3 Ways to Present Content

You will notice that the posts are broken down into three main categories of WAYS to present information:

• This vs That
• Listicles
• Stories

THIS VS THAT

These types of posts are trending on social media right now! As humans we are constantly comparing ideas, concepts, people, etc in our daily life… it’s how the human brain works! For example, when you are learning a new language, and whether you are studying grammar or vocabulary, you’re constantly comparing the new knowledge to that of your native language to help you remember.

By taking this concept and using it in social media posts, you are helping people a) understand your content better b) remember your content better 3) stop to read the post. To make these posts stand out even more, make sure you design a graphic/image that uses the “this vs that” post format to reach more people and help your post go viral.

LISTICLE

Listicles have always been a classic in the social media world…people love lists! This is an easy way to present information around topics that makes it easy for people to digest. To make these posts stand out even more, make sure you design a graphic/image that uses the “listicle”  post format to reach more people and help your post go viral.

STORIES

This is the classic way most information is presented on social media. The “story” format simply means that information is shared in a way that doesn’t utilize any special ways to organize the content. A classic example of this would be a post that’s introducing a topic (ex. “What are environmental toxins?).

Now let’s put both of these concepts together. Here are 9 examples of specific post ideas using the theme “Environmental Toxins”.

3 Examples:

1. Value
   1. Story: Why are some people more susceptible to chemical sensitivity
   2. Listicles: 5 common nutrient deficiencies associated with environmental toxin exposure
   3. This vs that: Dos and don’t of switching over your lifestyle to a nontoxic lifestyle
2. Personal
   1. Story: Something you’re currently struggling with in switching over to a low toxic life (ex. Finding a great non-toxic deodorant)
   2. Listicles: 3 things you can’t stand (pet peeves) when it comes to environmental toxins (ex. Fragrance in everything)
   3. This vs that: My makeup bag before vs after I found out about environmental toxins and switched over to cleaner products — Show side by side images
3. Inspiration 
   1. Story: Your reality now with toxic overload  doesn’t need to be your future reality
   2. Listicles: 3 things that I wish that people knew about living with a chemical sensitivity
   3. This vs that: Change your mindset from this to this when changing your life to a low-toxic life
4. Salesy 
   1. Story: Why you – why I decided to help women reduce env toxins in their life
   2. Listicles:  5 things I do with every client to help them reduce their toxic load
   3. This vs that: Where are you getting advice from vs where you should when it comes to environmental toxins (ex: “green washing” vs ewg.org)

Want the full Environmental Toxin Post Idea guide? It’s only $19 for 154 post ideas!

This concept of coming up with post ideas is a system I’ve created called the Map of Influence.

The Map of Influence

The Map of Influence is a system I’ve created to help bypass the frustration so that you never run out of post ideas again

Step 1: Choose 1-2 broad (yet, narrow) subjects that you want to be known for

Example: Autoimmunity

The key here is to only pick 1-2 things because I know how tempting it can be to say “but I can help with all / several of those things.”

However, to create an organic content strategy that converts you typically need to reign in your focus. The more you speak to “one person” the better your content will do in terms of engagement & conversions.

And I know this question is coming so I’ll answer it now for you. For those of you who do run a clinic that does focus on a larger target market, you can still go through this exercise and think about the following questions:

• What problems / symptoms do 80% of our clients / patients struggle with?
• Which patients / clients typically get some of the best results?
• Think about  some of your favorite symptoms / problems / clients to work with?

Often, even if you didn’t realize it at first, a common thread or theme will start to emerge. Use those themes as a starting place as your 1-2 broad categories.

Step 2: Choose 4-5 subcategories for each core value subject

Subcategories: Gut health, environmental toxins, chronic stress, detox

Step 3: Create a google doc / excel sheet and / or other files that you have easy access to.

Create a space for each of those 1-2 core categories + 4-5 subcategories.

Step 4: Now use the Concept Matrix to fill in post ideas

For each subcategory, fill in this matrix with 3 ideas for each.

Environmental Toxins: (see above example)

1. Value
   1. Story
      1. Idea 1
      2. Idea 2
      3. Idea 3
   2. Listicles
      1. Idea 1
      2. Idea 2
      3. Idea 3
   3. This vs that
      1. Idea 1
      2. Idea 2
      3. Idea 3
2. Personal
   1. Story
   2. Listicles
   3. This vs that
3. Inspiration 
   1. Story
   2. Listicles
   3. This vs that
4. Salesy 
   1. Story
   2. Listicles
   3. This vs that

For each subcategory you will end up with at least 36 ideas. If you have 5 subcategories, that’s 180 posts! 6 months worth of daily content!

Social Media Story Strategy

Did you know…

500 million users now use Instagram Stories every day.

1 in 4 Millennials and Gen Z-ers look for Stories of the products and services they want to buy.

One-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses.

Are you trying to post more Stories, but can’t find the inspiration to get them rolling?⁠

OR maybe you are posting stories, but they don’t seem to gain any traction with your audience?⁠

Maybe you are using stories BUT you’re not really seeing any results.

• This could be that you’re not using the 8 different types of stories
• This could be that you’re not using the right ratio of stories (photo – video – text)
• This could be that you’re not using the right story structure. (this one is KEY)

No? Lucky you!⁠

I admit, I used to struggle with stories when they first rolled out (who is with me?)⁠

Let me tell you a secret…⁠

It wasn’t until I had a clear view of the TYPES of stories I could use that I started showing up on my stories consistently.⁠

Once I knew WHAT stories to post, I started rotating through them and the results were amazing!⁠

I got so many DM’s and so many booked intro calls (so many that I had to create a waitlist…) I had to stop doing stories consistently until I fixed the bottleneck in my business!⁠

In case you are wondering which types of stories you can use to successfully promote yourself and your biz (without being salesy), here they are:⁠

8 TYPES OF STORIES

1. Personal stories that elicit an emotion⁠
2. Recommendations
3. Behind the scenes
4. Day-to-Day Life⁠
5. Ask advice⁠ from your audience
6. Other platforms (blog, YT, etc)⁠
7. Other people’s content
8. Value / tips / education

You don’t have to do all 8 of these types of stories every day! The goal is to share at least one story from every category three times per week.

Action Steps

Now is the time to begin implementing this information to begin to:

• Grow your following on IG
• Increase engagement
• Convert followers into clients

Feel overwhelmed by the information? Feel like you don’t know where to start or how to begin implementing this into a cohesive social media strategy?

No worries — I completely understand.

That’s why I did the heavy lifting for you and applied these concepts and created a FREE month long strategy for you.

Inside this FREE CONTENT CALENDAR, you will find both post ideas and story prompts designed to emotionally connect, provide value, and position YOU as the expert who has the solution that your audience is looking for.

Feel like you want even more support?

Then check out The Functional Media Content Bank. This is an unending supply of daily done-for-you social media posts, all written by a certified FMCA Health Coach & social media expert (me!).

Every month you get 30 done-for-you social posts around topics such as gut health, hormone health, lifestyle changes and more delivered every month! Learn more HERE.