Everything You Need To Know About Repurposing Your Content
If you’re not repurposing your best performing content, or the content that contains your key brand messages, you are missing out. Why? Because repurposing your content saves you time, as the message behind the content is already there AND you if you’re doing it correctly, you already know that piece of content will perform well.
If you’re unsure what repurposing your content means, it refers to taking an already existing piece of your own content, and putting it into another content format, or talking about it in a different way or for different platforms.
Why should you repurpose your content?
Repurposing your content isn’t just about creating a large bank of content ideas, although that is a huge benefit. As a business owner you will want you and your business to be known for a few key areas. If you’re not talking about these subjects, and sharing your expertise and giving helpful advice around these subjects on a regular basis, how are you going to do this? The answer is you’re not.
Therefore, repurposing your content:
Helps you build brand awareness
Saves you time on content creation
Allows you to recreate content that has previously performed well
Helps you continue to keep key brand messages at the front of your content
How do you decide which content to repurpose?
Repurposing social media posts
I prefer to repurpose my long format content, so blog posts, any videos or podcasts I might make or be in, even my website copy. This is because you can usually make a larger number of pieces of content from one piece of long format content than you could one social media post (I’ll tell you how to do this later). That said, I will sometimes to choose to repurpose some social media posts to. I decide which ones to do this with by looking at:
How well my posts have performed including increases in website traffic and email sign-ups in addition to the engagement on that single post.
Who has been commenting or engaging with the posts. Is it my ideal client?
Which posts contain my key brand messages that I need to be talking about regularly
From this, I will then choose which content types I need to create around that post that I haven’t already made, and which social media platforms I should post it on based on whether it will suit my audience and if I’ve spoken about that topic.
For example, I recently wrote a LinkedIn post on how to repurpose a blog post into multiple social media posts. I then took this post and altered the copy slightly and created a carousel post for Instagram and another post for my Facebook page. But I didn’t stop there. I’ve used that post and it will make up the next part of this blog post. I will also make a video of me talking about this for TikTok, Instagram reels and to repost to LinkedIn at a separate date.
That is a total of 6 pieces of content that I could post across three different channels. This will save me so much time later on, as the bulk of the work is done. But just think of how much content you could create from one blog post or podcast!
Repurposing long format content
This is where the magic of repurposing really happens. Once you’ve written your blog post, or recorded your podcast, use the following framework:
List the key points from the blog post/podcast
Write one social media post for each of these key points.
Pair each social media post with a relevant image/graphic/video.
Then, take each social media post and reword it slightly, or talk about that point from another point of view/add something to it. Do this 2-3 times.
Pair these additional posts with other relevant images/graphics/videos according to the content types you use.
Then take all of these posts, and tweak according to each of the social media platforms you use.
Suddenly you’ll find that one blog post or podcast that has 5 key takeaways, will have enabled you to create 15 different social media posts for multiple social media channels. (Obviously the number of pieces of content you create will depend on the number of points your long-form piece of content has).
And if you’ve written a blog post and also record a podcast, you’ve already got the basis for a podcast episode written too. All you need to do is expand on it to fill an episode.
You’ll also find that because the bulk of the work is done, it’ll take a much shorter period of time to create this content than if you were to create it from scratch. Make sure you are mixing the content up though, don’t just have a long string of posts going out one after the other on the same topic. Mix this up with other content (repurposed or not). to prevent your audience getting bored.
And that’s all there is to it, really. So save yourself sometime and stop yourself from getting into a creative block by starting to repurpose your content.