Repurpose Your Content for Social Media Marketing

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by Melanie Tamble | Last revised on
December 6, 2020
One of the biggest challenges in content marketing and corporate communication is the consistent development of outstanding content. Repurpose your content helps you to make the most of it. With a smart content repurposing strategy, you can reuse and convert existing content into more formats and publish your content on more channels to get more reach, engagement, and traffic.
In the ever-flowing stream of social media news, most content flows by unnoticed. Once you have put much effort into creating valuable content, you should repurpose your content to make the most of it .
Here are 7 basic strategies to repurpose your content for more traffic and engagement
1. Use multiple formats for your content
If you have multiple content formats at hand you can promote your content multiple times across multiple channels to maximize your reach and catch more eyeballs than with a single piece of content. For instance:
Turn your key facts and stats into charts, graphs, and illustrations
Turn quotes in memes to make them shareable
Write a checklist for your content
Create an infographic for your key facts, your stats, and graphs or an illustrated checklist
Summarize your key information with your images in a slideshow
Convert your slideshow into a slideshow video
Create a screencast for your tutorials and how-to content
Turn long-form articles or blog posts into a white paper or ebook
Turn blog posts and articles into press releases
Tools to use for repurposing your content in multiple formats:
With Canva or Venngage you can create super-fast and easy illustrations, charts and infographics. Canva offers a huge variety of templates, layouts, photos and icons you can use to create professional-looking images.
Powerpoint or Google Slides are basic tools to create a simple presentation of your blog post. You can create an mpg4 or .wmv file to use them as video.
Try Prezi to create vivid and animated slides.
Create a screencast with Camtasia if you need more options and editing.
Audacity helps you to create a simple podcast.
2. Update your evergreen content
Don’t let your evergreen content go stale in your archives. Select content and posts that performed well at their time. Re-read your old content thoroughly and replace irrelevant or outdated information with fresh data. For instance:
Add statistics and data from current research or studies, or
Refer to current news or events on your topic.
Add a stellar infographic or video or a checklist / white paper for downloading
Check all the links in your text and make sure they’re still valid and the landing page is still relevant.
Tools that help you refresh your old content
Use Google Analytics and find articles that performed well at the time, but is now slowing down in traffic.
3. Write follow-ups and series
Take a successful piece of content and create a series focussing on major aspects. The best types of serial posts are posts that give something an in-depth look, with each post dedicated to a specific aspect of the topic:
Pick an article for which you received a lot of engagement. Take a look at the comments and discussions about your topic and look for interesting questions you can follow up, or
Pick an evergreen topic, i.e. a how-to-series and pick up an aspect you can follow up as focus article, or
Take one topic of an old article and illustrate this topic with a case study as an example.
Link back to your original post and interlink all posts of the series to previous and future posts of the series. This allows new readers to read through your complete series. Internal links will also help the search engines to follow each link through your blog.
If your content is no series material, write a simple follow-up story.
Tools that help you for finding follow-up content material
Use Google Analytics and find articles that performed and received a lot of engagement and comments.
4. Republish your posts and articles
There are many platforms and sites with large communities that allow you to republish your blog posts and articles to get them to a wider audience. You can either publish a link and a summary of your post or copy & paste your article. Republishing content not only increases your reach, but it also increases brand awareness and adds to your reputation, builds links and helps to drive more traffic to your original content.
Examples of websites and publications accepting guest posts
BizSugar : BizSugar is a platform for small business tips and news. You can re-publish your content related to topics such as finance, technology, startups, and marketing.
Growth Hackers : GrowthHackers is a platform that allows you to promote content related to startup marketing and “growth hacking” by submitting the URL and a summary of your post.
LinkedIn Pulse : If you have a LinkedIn account you can republish your blog posts and articles in the pulse network.
Medium : Medium is a publisher community just like a blog network, where you can sign up and publish or republish your content.
Quora : Besides Q&A you can create posts and republish your content to the Quora community.
Reddit : Reddit is an extremely popular platform with hundreds of highly specialized communities (Subreddits). You can promote your posts and links and receive “Karma” by users vote. Your content is ranked by the value of your Karma.
Tumblr : The Tumblr network ist just like any other blog or social media network to publish and share content.
5. Syndicate your content by writing guest-post
Content syndication is another tactic of republishing your content on other sites to reach a broader audience. There are hundreds of influential sites and blogs that accept guest posts.
Even though guest posts usually supposed to be unique content, you can still take the main points of one of your existing blog posts and articles and use that as inspiration for your guest post. Some blogs will even allow you to republish your published articles as-is.
Many of the biggest and most influential sites on the web feature syndicated content, such as the New York Times .
Guest post should always be free of advertising and your content relevant and valuable for the audience of the respective site. However, before you consider submitting a guest post, make sure to read the guidelines and follow them thoroughly.
6. Advertise your content
Advertiser networks bring our content on third-party sites in front of people who are reading other, related posts. Related posts are usually published on a pay-per-click arrangement.
Your posts will be displayed as “Related Posts/Stories”, “Recommended Reading” on other sites and blogs.
Examples of advertising networks
Zemanta
7. Cross-promote your content on social media
Cross-promoting your content on social media is an important part of repurposing your content as it maximizing your opportunities.
However, sharing your content across multiple channels will be more effective and successful if you have a plan, how, when, and where to share your content. This will save you a lot of time in the process.
Develop a cross-promotion plan to repurpose your content
Whenever you launch a new piece of content, a  cross-promotion plan helps you to organize and manage your tasks to share, re-share, seed, re-publish and syndicate your content across the web.
Start by sharing your original content and images on your social media channels:
Share your content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you have business pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, share your content on your pages but at different times and days.
Share your images and infographics on Instagram and Pinterest.
Re-publish your content on content channels such as Reddit, Medium, Tumblr or Bloglovin, but schedule your posts for 5-7 days after publishing your original post to let Google index your original post first.
Also share and promote a link to your blog post to social bookmark communities and in blog networks such as Diigo, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Growth Hackers.
Schedule your posts at the best times for each network and across several days, weeks and months to extend the lifespan of your posts.
Re-share and re-schedule your evergreen posts from time to time to revive them.
Then use your multiple content formats and content snippets as social media posts to re-share your content
To re-share your content on social media, take your repurposed content formats and small excerpts or snippets (snack content) of your content and turn that into a social media post.
This is a smart way to re-share your content without repeating yourself by sharing the same piece of content in the same way over and over again. It will extend the lifetime of your content, link back to your content and drive more traffic to your original content. Make sure to include an image wherever possible to make your posts.
For instance:
Re-share your content with all your images and infographics on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. You can use image-post format for this purpose to focus your image. Use a different excerpt of your content in your comment for each post referring to the context of the image.
One blog post with different visuals
You can share this content also in relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups, or Subreddits on Reddit.
Share your images with your excerpts comments on Pinterest and Instagram.
Take a quote as image or meme from your content and use that as your Tweet, also share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter.
Share your slideshows with a link to your original content on networks like Slideshare , Scribd
Share your videos with a link to your original content on YouTube
Share your podcasts on sites such as iTunes , Soundcloud , Google Play Music , Stitcher , PocketCast
Share your white papers, ebooks or checklists on Slideshare, Scribd, Issuue.com .
Syndicate your content as a press release and submit them to PR networks, such as PR Newswire , PR Gateway , or PR Web .
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Tools for cross-promoting your blog post automatically across social networks
Blog2Social to share and cross-promote your content automatically to 15 most popular social networks, directly from your WordPress dashboard or your browser. You can customize and schedule your posts individually for each network and also re-publish your content on Medium, Tumblr, Bloglovin’ automatically.
Suggested Reading: How to optimize content for voice search
Summary
Before you start to create new content for your blog, always think about repurposing your existing content first. Look at your existing blog posts to check, if you can repurpose your content for other media formats, refresh your content or create more visuals, checklists or follow-ups. Re-publish, syndicate, re-share and seed your content across all relevant channels to maximize your opportunities for exposure. A cross-promotion plan and smart social media automation help you to save time and get more reach in less time.
For more tips, tricks and tactics for how to repurpose your content, check out this great infographic from Blog2Social .