The absolute BEST ways to repurpose blog content for social media!
You can be sure that you have a significant amount of work ahead of you as a marketer (and not enough time to get it done). When it comes to producing new and original content, you could also find that you experience bouts of writer’s block from time to time. So this blog is here to help you find ways to repurpose your content for social media!
You are constantly looking for methods to make your job easier while maintaining the same level of high-quality content production that you have been doing on a consistent basis in light of these constraints. You are in luck because there is something called content repurposing that can help relieve some of the pressure you are feeling.
The wonderful thing about repurposing your content is that it saves you the effort of coming up with new content on a daily basis for numerous platforms. This frees you up to focus on other aspects of your business. You can take that fantastic blog post that you just published and turn it into an Instagram carousel by making a few little adjustments to the language and the design.
At first glance, it may appear as though repurposing content is a technique to cheat the rules of the system. This is not the case. You are updating the content you already have, which is of high quality, and distributing it in a different format through additional channels and social media. In this post, we will examine the fundamentals of content repurposing, highlight the benefits that it can offer to your company, and discuss specific tactics that may be used to repurpose content that you have already developed. We will also discuss how to generate fresh content while keeping in mind how it can be reused in the future.
By repurposing your content, not only are you saving a significant amount of time and effort, but you are also expanding your reach and increasing your chances of connecting with your audience — and potential customers or clients — by appearing more consistently to highlight your expertise. This, in turn, saves you time and energy.
What is content repurposing?
Repurposing content can be defined in a variety of ways; however, for the sake of this article, we will define it as the process of taking material that you have produced for one platform and making strategic adjustments to ensure that it is relevant for posting on other platforms.
Therefore, repurposing is not as simple as simply publishing an Instagram photo on Facebook in this sense. It’s not merely the act of reposting that makes this idea effective; rather, it’s the deliberate modification of the original content to fit the tone and audience preferences of the next platform you’re going to put it on that does the trick.
You should always ask yourself if this information makes sense on another platform before repurposing it, and what you’ll need to alter in order to give it context and fit into the user experience of that particular platform. If it does, you should go ahead and repurpose it.
To merely republish something is not the same as to repurpose it. It’s the deliberate and strategic modification of a piece of content so that it can be used on the next platform that was planned for it.
Why is content repurposing important?
It will save you some time. You only need to produce one piece of long-form content to turn it into multiple pieces of shorter material with a suitable bite size for different platforms.
When checking stats, the last thing you want to see is your organic traffic staying the same, yet this is an issue that every marketer has to face at some point or another.
Changes in the industry, the manner in which your audience consumes information, the quantity (and quality) of new material you produce, and the degree to which your older content is still relevant can all contribute to peaks and valleys in website traffic.
Sometimes, all your content needs to keep your audience interested is a little bit of updating and repurposing every once in a while. I’ve compiled a list of advantages and illustrations below to serve as a source of motivation for your attempts to reuse existing materials.
4 Advantages of repurposing content
Get a boost for your SEO. Additional possibilities to target a targeted keyword can be created by creating multiple pieces of content revolving around the same issue. In addition, if you take your repurposed material outside of your site, you can obtain quality links back to your site, in addition to having the added benefit of being able to control the anchor text that is used in the link.
The majority of website visitors are still brought in through organic search. According to the findings of a study conducted by BrightEdge, organic search now retains a 51% share among traffic sources. If what you say is true, then repurposing optimised content in a variety of different formats can provide you with a considerable boost in organic visibility as well as visitors.
When you publish a wide variety of material, you provide yourself more opportunities to search real estate for certain searches. If you publish your content on other websites, you may (potentially) receive the advantage of backlinks to those websites from your own.
Get in front of a different audience. It’s possible that the initial piece of content you created just caught the attention of a subset of your audience of consumers. When you repurpose material for different channels, you are able to meet an audience where they are in their consumption of media. Michael Brenner, who works at SAP, has a very eloquent way of putting it: “Multi-channel marketing… offers the content our audiences are searching for, in all the places they search.”
It’s possible that the performance of a piece of content will be mediocre when you initially publish it. However, as time goes on, it builds momentum and begins to perform marginally better. If you repurpose the material in a different format and/or bring it up to date, you have the potential to reach new audience segments who might not have come across it otherwise.
Reinforce your message. In order to ensure that a message is received and processed by the recipient, repetition is often necessary. According to the Rule of 7 in marketing, prospective customers need to be exposed to your pitch seven times before they will commit to purchasing. The use of repurposed materials contributes significantly towards meeting this requirement.
Reusing your articles to convey a consistent message to your target audience is preferable than only addressing a subject once and then having it languish in the back catalogue of your website. If you are starting with material that is high-value and authoritative, this works out quite well. It makes it easy to find creative ways to reinforce the idea that you are trying to convey.
Acquire more influence and authority. If you publish high-quality material on a specific subject in a number of different locations, people will begin to view you as an authority on the subject and your profile will be raised in the industry.
How to choose which content to repurpose?
The majority of website visitors are still brought in through organic search. According to the findings of a study conducted by BrightEdge, organic search now retains a 51% share among traffic sources. If what you say is true, then repurposing optimised content in a variety of different formats can provide you a considerable boost in organic visibility as well as visitors.
When you publish a wide variety of material, you provide yourself more opportunities to search real estate for certain searches. If you publish your content on other websites, you may (potentially) receive the advantage of backlinks to those websites from your own.
Choosing the right content to repurpose for the right platform
So, you have decided that you like the concept of repurposing material and want to get started with it right away. You access the folders that contain your content, however there is an issue.
How do you determine which pieces of content will be recycled and in what way?
Examine all of the content that you have produced to this point across the various channels and mediums that you use. This may include promotional content such as video, podcasts, information guides, and traditional promotional materials such as brochures and pamphlets.
Make use of the analytical tools in order to locate:
- Content that customers keep coming back to
- Content that was really popular and had excellent engagement metrics
- Content that will never get outdated and is relevant to your brand.
- Previously published material that can be readily brought up to date to reflect current events.
11 Ideas on HOW to repurpose your content
First focus on creating a single piece of long-form content
You are going to produce an in-depth piece of content using this strategy, and then publish it on a platform such as your blog, your YouTube channel, or any other location where you publish your long-form material.
Begin by developing content for the marketing channel that you prefer the most.
Repurposing can also be viewed from the perspective of beginning with the marketing channel that is most appealing to you. This is the section of the content and channels in which you devote the majority of your time and where you have the strongest connection with the audience (i.e. Instagram or Facebook). After that, you will develop this idea further for longer-form pieces of content, such as your blog or your newsletter. Use a call to action to lead traffic to the pieces that are most relevant to the long-form content you’ve created so that you may maximise its exposure.
Turn internal data into case studies
What different kinds of data do you collect, and how do you make sense of them once you have them? There is room to use the data that you obtain to produce a case study if you assess the performance of traffic, collect data on SEO, or collect data related to social media metrics. You are able to try to learn something new while also drawing inferences from the facts that you have acquired in the past.
Converting data you’ve collected into a case study has a number of benefits, one of which is that it demonstrates to your audience that you are skilled at analysing data. It gives the appearance that your blog is more credible. Another advantage of carrying out the research is that it will provide you with the opportunity to determine the relationship between the significant choices you have made for your company and the outcomes that have resulted.
You could write a blog post on the case study as a means of distribution, or you could package it as a content offer as a means of potentially increasing conversion rates. It may also take the form of a unique download offer that is exclusive to email subscribers.
Have a post on your blog that is loaded with statistics or data? Take into consideration the production of an infographic.
Customers are drawn to visuals; therefore, compiling a summary of the most eye-catching statistics from your postings is an innovative and interesting way to lend significance to the material you produce. These infographics can be included within the blog article, but they can also be repurposed and shared on social media.
Use blog content for video content.
Making a brief video is an option to recording a podcast as a means of disseminating information; similarly, blog articles already contain a significant amount of useful information.
Videos are fascinating and entertaining. Because I am a visual learner, I find that watching video versions of blog postings, even if they only consist of someone talking, is enjoyable for me to do. A video that contains at least a few eye-catching images has the potential to really draw the viewer in.
If you already have a content plan for YouTube, filming a video that contains information from one of your blog posts can fit in like a glove with that strategy. By utilising this strategy, your material will be made available on more than one platform.
The addition of the video to a blog post is yet another method of disseminating video material. You have the option of adding “Video” to the title, retaining the introduction, and using the video as the body of the presentation instead. Skimmers are readers who are only interested in obtaining the most pertinent information in the least amount of time possible.
Make an ebook out of your long-form blog
If you want to provide your audience with long-form information that has instructional value, creating an ebook is an excellent choice to consider. You can offer the ebook as a more in-depth study of the information you’ve prepared and touch on certain essential aspects of the topic in your blog post, which you can use to introduce the reader to the topic. The well-known SEO resource Search Engine Journal took this approach with their blog post series about Content Marketing. In addition to the ten articles that can be accessed without charge, they also provide a more comprehensive ebook guide.
Quotes from thought leaders can be extracted.
Do you frequently seek out contributions from seasoned professionals in relevant fields or prominent opinion leaders? In that case, you hire these individuals because you are aware of the significant knowledge they possess (and your audience will think so as well). You can make infographics using powerful quotes from articles, post them on your social media accounts, or use them as snippets in email newsletters if you take quotes from the articles.
Using old images in different ways
Make use of outdated photographs as backgrounds for your posts.
Do you have graphics of a high quality that you’ve only ever utilised once? You could use these as backgrounds for your posts. You can use these photographs as the background for quotes that you extract from blog articles, as long as you adhere to the size limits of Instagram. Alternatively, you can simply publish the images on their own to attract audience attention to a project that you have completed in the past.
Share excerpts from videos that you have already made available online.
Do you have videos posted on YouTube or any other kind of video content that relates to your business? Share fragments on various social networking platforms.
You are able to upload video content on the majority of platforms, which means that you may easily reuse a video for each of the platforms on which you have a presence if you trim it down to comply with the duration criteria for videos on each of those platforms.
You should repost the content from your other social media profiles.
You are able to share content from one of your social media platforms to another of your social media profiles, however, doing so may appear to be somewhat confusing.
This could include taking a screenshot of a Facebook post in order to share it on LinkedIn; taking a picture of a YouTube thumbnail in order to promote a new video on your Instagram Story; or taking a screenshot of a Tweet in order to publish it on your Instagram profile.
Repurpose by Bringing Your Old Content Up to Date
Would it be possible for you to update some of your previous posts? Probably. On a subject that you have already written about, there may be more recent developments or advice that you can provide your readers. Therefore, you should take your previous content, make some changes and additions to it, and then republish it. You shouldn’t have to undertake a comprehensive redesign, but you should make sure that it appeals to today’s audience. Although doing a complete revamp is an option, it shouldn’t be necessary.
One more tip is to conduct an analysis of your content and determine which blog entries perform the best. Do not publish the blog item in question as a new post if you find that it is not as up-to-date as it could be but that it is still producing a significant amount of traffic and leads, or if it is ranking highly for a competitive keyword.
Instead, change the content while it is still contained within the same post. This will allow you to preserve the URL as well as the SEO value of the original post. On some blogging platforms, you may even change the date that the post was published, which allows you to show it on your blog as if it were a brand-new post.
In order to improve the potential for lead generation, it is also a good idea to think about updating (or adding new) calls-to-action to articles that are still generating traffic.
You can accomplish the same thing with electronic books. Whether you released it just last year or five years ago, give it a facelift and start promoting it again with some updated information! This will save you the time and effort of generating a blog post or ebook from the ground up, while still providing you with all of the benefits that come along with using a fresh ebook.
If you decide to go in this direction, you should think about utilising UpContent to generate email digests and social media postings so that you may share newly published, high-performing items with your audience.
Offer guest contributions for topics you’ve already covered.
Repurposing content can also help create ties within an industry. Let’s imagine there is a subject matter in which you believe you are an authority, but you’ve already written a blog post on the subject. Have you sought out to other companies in the industry that are comparable to yours to request an interview concerning this matter?
The topic that you have discussed in the blog post and the reasons why it is valuable information may be the subject of the interview. Alternately, the information that you have provided in the initial blog could be used in a guest post.
Through the usage of this strategy for repurposing content, you can create a relationship with a company that operates within your industry, which can be beneficial for future endeavours. In addition to this, the publicity will bring the customer base of the other company to your own.
Final thoughts on content repurposing
In the end, as a content creator, you do what you do because you are confident in your ability to be of help to the people who consume your work. Unfortuitously, it does not take place in a single night to produce content of a high quality. It is a process that requires time, attention, and resources, and it can at times be very tedious.
It is not intended that repurposing your old material serve as a replacement for the production of new content; rather, this tactic is supposed to be used in addition to the production of new content. You can keep on producing new content while at the same time breathing new life into your already existing, high-quality pieces and presenting your audience with information that is both timely and relevant.
