If you’re like us and you enjoy using Pintrest for your ideas board then you’ll no doubt have heard of ‘up-cycling’. You can take an old item like a bookshelf, stain it and repaint it, now you’ve got an up-cycled bookshelf.
Up-cycling or repurposing, as it’s more commonly known, is the process of taking something old and turning it in to something new or more valuable than what it was previously.
Repurposing isn’t limited to DIY projects, it works just as well when it comes to repurposing content.
Repurposing your content is the art of transforming it to add value to it and then bring it back in to your content cycles.
If you’re not already repurposing your social media content, then this article is for you, it is a smart way to stay consistent with your content, see growth in your audience and extend the reach of your brand.
Why do we repurpose content?
We generally suggest to repurpose content for social media because it’s a time saver. You’ve already spent hours brainstorming ideas and making the effort to bring those ideas to life, by repurposing your content you can completely skip the time consuming creation stage and go straight to posting content.
Many content managers fall into what we call the ‘content creation treadmill’. This is where you are spending all your time creating content and publishing it, and then getting back on the treadmill to create more content and start the cycle again. When you operate like this it can be hard to see what pieces of content are actually working for you and your brand, leading to eventual burnout during the process.
You can repurpose your content in a variety of ways to get you off the treadmill cycle.
Getting off the content treadmill is going to save you from exhausting yourself, but the biggest reason to start up-cycling your content is to stop gambling.
We don’t mean gambling in the classic sense, we’re talking about the gamble of content creation. Not every piece of content is going to be a winner, just like not every piece of content is going to see zero interaction from your. Not every post we create is going to be a sure fire winner.
This is why you want to make the most out of the content that prove to be winners.
Repurpose and recycle to start seeing extra benefits to your workflow;
- Extra time to create even better content
- Extended reach. Different platforms have different audiences which means that you can take a piece on content you made for one platform, repurpose it and post it to another platform.
- Promotes brand awareness, if your brand is visible regularly and in many places you will continue to grow.
What content is good to repurpose?
The best thing about repurposing content is that it really only takes one great piece of content to get started. Go into your analytics and find your best performing piece of content and start with repurposing that one.
Doesn’t matter what format the content is, it could be a reel or a podcast episode or even an event that you attended as a speaker.
Certain types of content will be best for repurposing;
Evergreen: Evergreen content is content that will be relevant and provide value, long after it has been published. Content that doesn’t conform to current trends, it is simply put, great content that never loses its value.
Series: A series of content that is based around a specific topic can easily be transformed into new pieces of content.
Authority: If you have a piece of content that shows off your personal success story, it’s perfect to repurpose.
The main thing to remember with repurposing your content is to avoid things that are timely or evolving in the mainstream, because you want your content to be relevant for weeks and months after you’ve repurposed it.
Keep in mind that if your core piece of content isn’t a winner, then your repurposed content may not perform well either.
Here’s some ways to repurpose your content:
1. Repurpose blogs into audio content.
These days we tend to read less and less, but we do find time to listen, whether we’re at the gym or on the way to work. Repurposing your blog content into an audiobook or podcast gives you a brand new way to reach your audience.
2. Repurpose blogs into an infographic.
Blog content is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to repurposed content. Giving new life to what you wrote with a flashy infographic will bring more eyes and attention to what you want your audience to know.
The best thing is that you can share infographics to every major social media platform to reach a wider audience.
3. Repurposing video content.
Video content is one of the easiest things to repurpose since you’ve already put so much work into the video, you can take bits and pieces from it and turn those into new snippets of content.
Our starting point is going to be a YouTube video, it doesn’t matter what the subject of the content is, just that you have a video posted to your channel that you can now chop up and repurpose for your other channels.
Step. 1 - Share your video to YouTube and IGTV. You want your content to get in front of people who are already using a platform, putting it on both will achieve this.
Step. 2 - A creative caption. Come up with five different captions and use a different one for each platform you decide to share your video on.
This will give you a chance to see which caption works best with your content, you can use analytics to find out all the required info for you to move forward with the winning caption.
Keep in mind not to release them all at the same time, try this over a period of two weeks with a few days space in between each upload to give your caption the best chance to stand out.
Step. 3 - An Instagram post. Even though you’ve already shared the full video to IGTV, you are going to want to share a snippet of the video as repurposed content to your Instagram feed.
With social media you need to create once, but promote often. This means finding new ways to leverage the work that you’ve already done.
Don’t worry about repeating content, not all of your followers are always going to see every post you make, which means we need to remind our followers of our content. The easiest way for this on Instagram is to simply share your post to your stories, giving your followers a clickable link to the full post on your profile.
Step. 4 - The blog.
The most underrated place for your content is your blog.
All of your videos need somewhere to live, and your website is the best place for that. Having them all on your website increases the longevity of your videos, which leads to further engagement. If you’re relying on just posting once to a platform then your content is going to get lost in the shuffle.
Your website and blog are your space on the internet, free from trends and flavour of the month type content. If you let your content live on your website then you have somewhere to direct traffic to, a backlink if you will. This allows you to see an increase in page views, gives you the opportunity to leverage more offers and increase your email list.
We never know exactly what the algorithm is going to do next, so keep your content safe on your blog and come back to it when needed.
Step. 5 - Instagram Stories.
Once you’ve put together content on your blog, the time comes for promotion. Instagram stories are an extremely popular way to get your content to be seen my more of your audience than usual.
Create a few stories and schedule them in advance.
You can choose from a few different options for what you want the stories to say;
- Use the image that you have in your blog post to create some promos for your story.
- Share bullet points about what you cover in the video.
- Share the IGTV video, add some GIFs and overlay it with text.
Step. 6 - Email.
When growing a business, email is your best friend. If you already have a list on emails of your audience then you want to keep them warm and engaged with whatever message it is.
If your audience are the type of people who regularly check their emails and click into messages, then you’ll want to send them an email with new information about yourself, whether its a new blog post or a new video that you’ve posted to your YouTube channel. Keep them in the loop with whatever you’re doing.
Step. 7 - Pintrest.
If ever there was a platform deliberately built for repurposed content, it would be Pintrest.
One of the best things about the platform is that when you post content it lives on Pintrest forever. The shelf life of a pin on Pintrest is substantially longer than any other social media platform.
Pinterest allows for templates to be created which will save you time and effort in the long run, these can be built in a design tool like Canva for example.
Pinterest Group Boards are going to be your main target when repurposing content to put on the platform.
These groups have their own audience, with some groups surpassing 100,000 members. This is a huge number of people that you can get your content out in front of. Become a collaborator of the group and interact with it for a month or so before you share your own content, and you’ll find that your audience begins to grow quicker than you could have imagined.
4. Podcasts become ebooks.
Free ebooks are one of the quickest ways to get people to sign up to your email list.
If you’ve recorded some podcast or video interviews, transcribe them into an ebook that people can get for free simply by signing up.
It’s that easy.
Final Thought
Repurposing your content is the key to staying consistent, reaching new audiences and creating fantastic content without burning yourself out.
