Want to know the best tip for social media management? Repurposing content.
Why would you spend your time, energy and resources creating a piece of content and only publishing it once? It sounds crazy, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses are doing that.
The way to scale your social media quickly and cost effectively is to produce quality evergreen content and then repackage and share it across your chosen social media platforms.
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content is material that is relevant all year round. It is not date-specific and can be as valuable for someone reading it now as in the depths of winter or next year or the year after. Evergreen content lends itself well to this repackaging and repurposing that I’m going to take you through now.
Three bright ideas on how to repackage your content
Here are some ideas on how you can bring a new lease of life to content you’ve produced before, reach new audiences and get a better return on that investment you’ve put into creating it in the first place.
Blog posts
If you’ve been busy writing researching and writing blog posts and creating images to lift them, it’s a shame to only publish them once.You can take some posts you’ve written on a topic and repurpose them into a guide like we did here with this one on Facebook Live.
We found ourselves writing a lot about Facebook Live, so we brought all the blog posts together and created one super post called ‘Facebook Live: A Guide’. Take a look at your blog and see if you can group a collection of posts together and make a guide, or better still – an ebook (which I like to call ‘book’ because ‘e’ smacks of a language when all this was new). We’ve also done this with great success on Snapchat. Our post on Snapchat filters ranks well on Google because of its length. Google likes longer form content (minimum 1,200 words).
You can also take your posts and make a tip sheet which you can put behind an email wall on your site and use as a lead magnet. Don’t just give it away if it’s good content that people need and want.
Slidedecks
Have you been asked to present at a conference, event, or internal meeting about a subject and invested lots of time and energy making that super slide deck that currently resides on your drive on your computer? That doesn’t have to be the case anymore, not when you’ve got Slideshare available.
Slideshare is a social network for sharing slides. If you haven’t checked it out before, go and take a look at it. It’s a great place to get inspired and to get knowledge, as well as to publish your slides and establish yourself as a thought leader in your area.
LinkedIn purchased SlideShare a couple of years ago, and you can post those lovely decks direct to your LinkedIn profile.
Another great use of slide decks is to repackaging your main ideas into an infographic. Why not spend a little bit of time condensing your thoughts into one single image in the form of an infographic? You can do this yourself using a free design tool like Canva. So you don’t have to pay an expensive designer to do it, although expensive designers will listen to your ideas and display them in ways you’d never have thought possible.
Video
Finally, you can’t have a post about social media without including video. We’ve been doing Facebook Live since 2017, and we have evolved a process for repackaging the video content that works well.
In advance of your Facebook Live, be sure to promote out across your social networks that you’re doing live, communicate the date and time.
Then when your live broadcast is over, it’s a very good idea to chop it up and share the video out across the different social platforms. Because every platform has a different flavour, you need to create the video to fit the platform. Below is a quick ‘how long’ guide for the various social media channels.
- Instagram – 60 seconds
- Twitter – 140 seconds
- Blog – unlimited
- Facebook – unlimited
- YouTube – highlights
See how much mileage you can get from one Facebook Live which probably took about 10 minutes to do? When you chop it up and republish it out across the networks, you can amplify your message and appear to be everywhere.
It goes without saying that you’re only going to do this with quality content. Take care to produce only great quality material that will let you shine, will demonstrate your knowledge and expertise to your target audience.
There is far too much noise, and poor quality content shared on social media, you don’t want to be a contributor unless what you’ve got is worth it.
Article by Maryrose Lyons, the founder of the Learn Social Media Like A Pro online course.
