Re-purposing your content on social media is a viable method in making sure your best work is seen by other audiences. In other words, people who are new to your brand may not have seen the past posts you’ve created. This means you can re-use old content to engage the new audience.
Why is re-purposing useful?
Many bloggers will create amazing pieces that perform well online. However, these articles may still be able to do much better if utilized on social networks.
Instead of focusing on attracting people via search engines, social engagement could essentially boost the traffic to your site and/or business. Not everyone on YouTube may realize your website exists – but they could when you begin to re-purpose your content.
Putting your old stuff up on social media also keeps the account active. Perhaps you didn’t create content for today but still want to update Facebook. That’s easy to do if you take an older article and share it with your audience.
Re-purposing is also useful for those who have trouble coming up with new content on a regular basis. You have access to a myriad of methods to help come up with ideas, and re-purposing can make the process much easier and less time-consuming.
Let’s Begin Re-purposing Your Materials
Deciding the Best Content
The first thing you need to decide is what content you want to use first. This should be the best performing articles you’ve developed for your website.
Using tools such as Google Analytics or JetPack in WordPress can help you determine which posts were the most interesting to the majority of your visitors.
You want to find posts that show the most visits, the most time on page and the most landed on. This is the material your target audience finds engaging and will more than likely be what social network audiences want to experience.
Using Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is that material that doesn’t change over time. It’s usually heavily based in unwavering facts and will remain true today as it will be in 30 years. Depending on your business, this may be difficult to determine.
However, nearly every industry has evergreen facts that you can promote. While this may not be a requirement for re-purposing your articles, it will still play a powerful role in how relevant and successful the campaign will be in the future.
The Social Aspect of Re-purposing
Social media is perhaps one of the easiest outlets for re-purposing old content from a website. The point is to connect with new users or those who may not have seen the original share when it was created.
Fans of your brand may even appreciate a refresher of the content.
Out of all social platforms, Twitter is one of the easiest to re-purpose content. Since you’re allowed 280 characters, it’s easy to make short highlights of the blog post to be used.
For example: If you have a blog post of the top 10 reasons to go camping in Wyoming, you could list each reason on Twitter one post at a time. This will give you 10 individual tweets regarding your single page of content while possibly generating interest from other users.
As the system has more than 336 million active users each month, the potential for sharing your content is exceptional.
Using popular hashtags in each one can also vastly improve your exposure.
Like Twitter, it’s easy to cut down a blog post to be used several times for attracting followers in Facebook. However, you’re provided with far more characters per post.
This allows you to go into as much or as little detail as you want depending on your strategies for social marketing.
Since users of the popular social app spend 950 million hours per day on Facebook, it’s by far one of the most engaging social platforms on the Internet. In fact, it receives nearly twice the activity per person as Twitter.
The more you share on this social hub, the better are your chances for improving the site’s reputation.
Google+
Although Google+ is not as popular as many other platforms, it still has enough of a user-base to make it worth putting up content. In fact, many small businesses often receive more traffic through this social channel than on Facebook or Twitter.
Part of this is how the content is delivered to people that use Google+. As about 50% of the Internet population uses this platform, it’s still an integral part of social marketing.
YouTube
Video is one of the fastest growing methods for marketing on the Internet. In fact, YouTube displays approximately one billion video views per day to mobile devices alone.
YouTube makes it even better by offering a great deal of tools, sharing and advertising capabilities. Taking one of your best works on the blog and converting into a video has potential to help your branding in profound ways.
You could also break down the blog post as you would for Twitter and create short videos on the different aspects of the single post.
LinkedIn and SlideShare
LinkedIn and SlideShare are populated by more of a professional audience. LinkedIn alone accommodates more than 500 million users. And 40% of those people log in on a daily basis.
Although LinkedIn and SlideShare focus more on the profession crowd, it doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t benefit from using the system to boost your reputation.
This is especially true in the professional dynamic. Building a presentation on something like SlideShare could be much easier by using content you’ve already developed.
It may attract a more business-minded audience to your website.
Buffer and Hootsuite
Buffer and Hootsuite are platforms that will allow you to create social media posts and release them en mass. You can either share your content now or set these tools to release certain posts at specific times or days.
This means you can take that top 10 list and share each point of it on 10 different days automatically all linking to the same blog post.
Flexibility in Re-Purposing
You don’t need to focus on blog posts in order to re-purpose content. Videos, images and more can be reused to boost your social engagement. For instance, you could easily turn a video you created into a podcast.
The possibilities are great and can help you deliver a large number of content for social channels while having less content to develop.