Medical Content Creation: How Do You Do This Thing? (Part 3 of 3)

As we move from the question of, “what are the different platforms for relaying your medical content?” in the previous post, I can now discuss, in general terms, the idea of preparing your content for the different platforms. It takes a reasonable amount of time to create quality content. So, you may not want all of that time and energy put into creating that great content to go to waste on just one post on one platform. Hence, the crux of the content issue for those using multiple communication platforms…

Do you need to create different content for different platforms?

You’ve finally figured out how you are going to go about creating medical content and which platforms and communication styles you are going to utilize. However, as most of us are in the beginning, we are faced with the question, “do I need to create different content for different platforms?”. Well, the good news is that you don’t need to create entirely different content for each specific platform. The medical content that you create can be repurposed amongst the varying platforms. However, it needs to be converted to a style that is appropriate for that platform. If you have been on any of the specific platforms, you can see the difference in the tone or culture of them. LinkedIn has a more professional feel to it and is more work focused, while a medium like TikTok is more entertaining and informal. Each individual platform has a definite culture to it and you need to appeal to the culture in order to generate interest in your target audience. Also, the demographics of that platform need to be considered, as the different platform audiences are different. For example, 71% of individuals in the 18 – 29-year-old age group have used Instagram, but only 30% have used LinkedIn. This will have an impact on the appeal of your material, which depends on the successful matching of your content with the interests of your audience in each of the different platforms.

As an example, you want to talk about asthma in children and generate content around the topic of how to recognize a severe asthma attack. The content that you create can be used in, let’s say, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. But, the format will need to be adjusted. In Twitter, you will have more text and may run a series of tweets together with links to references and may have some infographics. On your Instagram account, you may have text on your post, but will definitely need photos and, possibly, some video to demonstrate the symptoms. With TikTok, a video of the symptoms, either showing the symptoms or the symptoms being explained by you, will be the key. There may also be background music and a little text on the screen (but, not nearly as much text as Twitter or Instagram). You will need to appeal to different audience demographics of your audience as well. Age, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, and geography are important demographics to consider. A nice way to explore how content is repurposed is to visit profiles of established content creators on their various social media platforms. Some content will be repurposed and some won’t. Most medical content creators will utilize different social media platforms and you can see how they use the same material and repurpose it to fit the demographics and design of each of the platforms they are involved with.

I hope that this helps explain how to approach creating varied medical content. If you are having difficulty figuring out how to repurpose your content, or even if you should repurpose your content, you can ask yourself the following questions to focus your efforts.

Which medical content can I use on different communication platforms and how can I adjust it to fit the styles and audience demographics of those different platforms?

What methods of presentation are used for the content posted on the different platforms?

What is the likely mindset of the audience using the platform that I want to post my content on? Is the audience looking for entertainment, wanting to catch up with family or friends, looking for business or work connections, or searching for news or informative articles?

Now that we’ve finished our discussion about the “why” and “how”, we will move on to the discussion about the “what”. It is the “what” that inspired me to create this series of articles. The following posts will be dedicated to the “what” of online content creation because it can be a sticking point for most of us. What do I want to say? What message do I want to relay? Where do I get ideas for content? I will outline my thoughts about it in a number of posts and do not intend to set a limit on them because there are so many sources to get great ideas for content!

What advice can you give to others on how to repurpose medical content? Do you feel that medical content should be repurposed over various online platforms?