Creating consistent social media content that gets results is somewhat of an art form. It takes time and effort to get really good at it, but a skill that is almost universal, across the board for those who excel in social media marketing, is that nearly all learn how to effectively repurpose their content.
While we don’t want to post the same thing over and over, there is a nuance that is learned for how to say or make similar points in different ways. And since brevity is crucial for status updates and tweets, your brand should consistently talk about a handful of topic categories and not much more, or you run the risk of watering down your core message. When you examine all these factors, begins to make sense why repurposing is so important.
1: Review Old Blog and Social Media Posts
A source of content gold is your blog archives. Take a look and see all the interesting and thought-provoking posts you’ve already published to the world. Many times, you’ll notice that great content stands the test of time and your audience would benefit from seeing that post again. This is the exact time to repurpose those old articles.
There are a number of things you can do with an old blog post to freshen it up for republishing. First thing you can do is to simply remove any dated material to bring it current. Alternatively, you can write a short introduction paragraph to introduce an old post that, for whatever reason, it’s timely to republish here again today.
2: A Good Post Sparks Inspiration
Take old content to help spark new ideas or inspiration. Something you wrote about a few years back may not be just right to republish again today, however it may give you a new perspective or new approach on the topic at hand.
3: Change the Format
Another great way to repurpose your old content is to simply change the format. So let’s say you had previously published an infographic. You can examine the infographic and create an article that now summarizes or drills down into different aspects that are addressed on the infographic and you have a brand-new article to publish. And of course, if you published an article you can always go the other way and turn it into an infographic. The same process can be used with video, PowerPoint slides or anything else.
4: Expand Upon Existing Ideas
Taking your existing content and expanding on the ideas that you’ve already address is another simple way to repurpose your content. You may have written about something in more of a general sense in the past, and now based on experience you can to go into much greater detail and create new content based off of that, in doing so.
5: Conceptual to Experiential
And finally, along similar lines as the last point, you can take content that is more conceptual in nature and now tell the story in a way that is more experiential. So give more of the details of what was involved, and tell the story rather than present a concept. Having both pieces will appeal to different segments of your broader audience and round out your content library.