Have you ever posted one of those amazing Facebook updates that had that indescribable quality that results in a surge of likes, comments, clicks, and shares, actually goes viral and then immediately wondered how to replicate that level success with more of your content?
Trying to come up with the amount of outstanding, engaging content needed to get that elusive “organic” reach on multiple platforms takes time, is exhausting, and sometimes we just plain run out of ideas.
Being able to repurpose your content will make your life so much easier. Knowing the tried and true ways to repurpose your best social media content is key to getting consistently good results. In this post, we’re going to look at how to repurpose social media content and how to choose the content to repurpose.
Customizing Your Cross-Platform Content
You can — and should — repurpose great content across multiple platforms. Have a great blog post or video? Post it everywhere!
While you can post the same content on multiple platforms, it’s essential that you should customize it for each platform you’re repurposing it for.
Facebook posts should have only one or two hashtags that make sense within the post, for example, while tweets should have a few and Instagram posts should have a ton. You’ll also need to be more concise on Twitter, and have a more professional tone on LinkedIn. Content going to Pinterest and Instagram should only utilize high-quality images or video.
Consider how businesses use Snapchat and Instagram; both are image sharing platforms that have overlapping features (which, yes, Instagram might be copying from Snapchat). Despite this, users and businesses approach the platform completely differently. The platforms have different tones, different audiences and very different types of images are used.
You should approach each platform as separately as you’d use Instagram and Snapchat, even if it takes a little extra work; this is how you’ll get the most results from your repurposed content.
High Performing Content Is Gold
Repurposing social media content doesn’t mean copying and pasting great statuses into your scheduling tool (though, technically, you can do this). Instead, update the content that worked so well when you share it again. You’ll almost definitely get stronger results on your second campaign if you share a new version of the original content instead of an exact duplicate.
Examples of how you can do this include:
- Update older high-performing blog posts with new information, and announce the updates in your social media posts when you share it.
- Pull several different great single lines from blog posts, videos, or interviews that you’re sharing. Each time you share the content on social media, use a different quote as your tagline. A quote from a celebrity influencer, as seen in the example below, can also be a great tagline.
- Compile user-generated content (UGC) shared on the platform into a single Twitter Moment that you then promote and send traffic to. By placing it in a new format and clustering it together, you can make it more powerful and impactful. This Twitter Moment pictured below-compiled user’s reactions to the news that Cadbury was looking for taste testers, and the creative UGC is even more fantastic when grouped together.
Repost at Different Times
The biggest reason to repurpose content on social media is to get even more results on your best performing posts. To fully maximize the visibility of your content, you should share repurposed posts at a different time of the day than their original posting times. If you shared your original post on Facebook on a Thursday afternoon, for example, try to reshare it on a Tuesday at 6 A.M or a Sunday at 8:30 P.M.
If you can use a publishing tool that will make scheduling so much easier. You can schedule posts ahead of time with just a few clicks, and — if necessary — you can check on the publication time of the original post.
This allows you to optimize your repurposed content for maximum visibility and engagement, helping you reach an audience that potentially hasn’t seen it yet. You should create custom messages for each social platform.
Be sure to remove hashtags from your Facebook message, make your post a bit more professional on LinkedIn, and any other tweaks you need to better engage with each platform.
If you’re sharing the content now, you may know that you’ll want to share it again later. While you’re inputting the upcoming post, you can also schedule another version of the post several months from now. You can reschedule it at any time, but you’ll know it’s on the schedule and ready to go so you won’t have to worry about it later.
What Content Should I Repurpose?
When you’re deciding what content you should repurpose, the low-hanging fruit is to repurpose your highest performing posts. You can find out which content has the best results on each platform through social analytics tools.
You will review to see which posts got the most engagement. You should keep a lookout for what types of engagement each received, and which hashtags yielded the best results. You can use this information to find your strongest content for repurposing.
There are some exceptions to this. Timely content should not be repurposed, for example; whether your Instagram post announced breaking news for your business or shared holiday discounts, it won’t be nearly as relevant the second time.
Focusing on useful, valuable evergreen content is the smart move when you want to repurpose social content. Examples include links to educational blog posts or video tutorials. You can even take “live” content like a Twitter chat, turn it into a blog post, and upload post links across multiple social platforms.
You should always check the content the post is linked to in order to ensure that it’s up to date. I could share a seemingly evergreen blog post about Instagram Ads, for example, but if it lacked current information like new types of ads or the addition of video posts, it wouldn’t have the same impact.
Repurpose Your Social Media Content!
Repurposing your best social media content ensures that more people will see and interact with your posts. This can give your Pages and profiles a boost in each site’s algorithms that factor in engagement. By finding, tweaking, and scheduling your highest performing content, you’ll guarantee that your posts live up to their full potential.
