How To Effortlessly Repurpose Your Content on Social Media
Repurposing content on social media is a tricky task that demands great planning and thought. If you’re doing your social media repurposing wrong, you risk boring your followers to death by presenting the same content over and over again. Eventually, it’ll get old, and people will lose interest.
We all know how difficult and exhausting it is to come up with incredible, high-performing, and engaging content all the time for social media. Sometimes we run out of ideas, sometimes we even risk outburning ourselves. Sometimes, the best solution is to repurpose your best-performing content on social media.
Therefore, it’s crucial that you know how you’re going to repurpose content in the best possible way so you avoid boring your followers, while also cramming every single drop of marketing juice that is left from the content that you’ve spent time creating. When repurposing content correctly on social media, you’ll save both time and effort while also getting further engagement and results from your previously well-performing posts.
In this article, we’re looking at how you can repurpose and reuse your best-performing content on social media.
What should you repurpose?
Well, I’ll start off by saying that you shouldn’t repurpose every piece of content.
Some pieces of content that you post on social media will perform very well, and others may just slowly fade away, and not result in remarkable engagement or interest.
Posting content on social media is, to some extent, a roulette where you never know what content will blow up, gain thousands of interactions and shares, and what content will make your audience wrinkle their forehead and say “eh” and move on.
After a while, you start learning what type of content generally works well, and what doesn’t, but even after my many years of using social media, there are posts that I don’t believe will perform well that completely blows the internet (at least in my small world), and other pieces that I am overly enthusiastic about that no-one seems to care about.
In other words, knowing what type of content that will perform well is extremely difficult, and there is no real way to predict the future.
You’ve probably heard the famous quote “The best way to predict the future is to create it”, but on social media, it is very hard to predict the future due to the simple fact that it is, to a large extent, dependent on the recipients.
Therefore, I have made my very own quote from it that goes:
“The best way to predict the future is by looking at the past”
–Jens Wirdenius
Awesome, right?
This brings me to my main answer to the question “What should I repurpose?”
To predict the future of what content will work well on social media, you have to look at how they performed in the past. You don’t want to repurpose all type of content and the type of content you shouldn’t repurpose is the content that didn’t perform well in the past.
If it didn’t perform well in the past, you can be pretty sure that it won’t perform well now. That’s like giving coffee to a baby. It won’t like it the first time, and it will definitely not like it the next time just because you wait a week, right?
With the help of the right tools, finding out which posts are the best-performing posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other social platforms is easier than you might think.
A simple way to find your best performing posts on Instagram is with by using Instagram Insights, that sometimes go by the name of Analytics.
If you haven’t yet converted your Instagram account to a business account, you can learn how to do so here. When you convert your Instagram account, you’ll get access to your Insights where you can see your best-performing posts as well as other very valuable analytics.
Go to your profile and tap the chart icon located in the top right corner. Scroll down until you see “Posts” and tap “See more”. Here, you can choose to filter your posts based on several different criteria, but the presets will work very well and present your best-performing content at the top and the least well-performing content at the bottom.
You can find your best-performing posts on your Facebook business page by visiting the Facebook Insights tool. You access this tool by clicking the Insights tab located at the top of your Facebook page.
Now, click the “Posts” located in the menu in top-left corner.
Scroll down and you’ll find a list of all your published posts. You’ll also be able to view some statistics about them.
Scroll down to the menu where you can filter your posts. Choose the metric that you best think defines a “successful post” for you. Remember that posts that you’ve boosted with ads also will come up, so have that in mind so you’re not comparing apples and oranges when looking at paid respectively organic post to avoid being misled.
Finding your top-performing posts on Twitter is extremely easy.
To do so, go to your Twitter Analytics dashboard. Here, you’ll be able to view your top tweets for each month.
Knowing what posts have performed well on the different platforms will be tremendously helpful when you’re going to repurpose content because it is with that information you’re going to select posts to repurpose. Just remember that just because a post performed well on one platform doesn’t mean that it will perform well on another platform, but most of the time, it will, and that’s why you don’t want to start repurposing content that performed badly on one platform in the hopes that it will perform better on another.
It might be the case, but most often not.
Seamlessly, that brings me to my next point.
Share your content across platforms (+ customize and fine-tune)
You can repurpose content both across platforms but also for the same platform that you initially shared it.
When you reshare posts that you’ve posted previously on a platform, it’s usually referred to as “reposting” but more on that later.
Chances are, you’ll have diffrent people following you on different platforms. Sure, some people might be super enthusiastic about your brand and follow you wherever you go, but for the majority of people, that won’t be the case.
Therefore, repurpising content across platforms is something that I highly recommend. Doing so ensures that you get more bang for your efforts of creating the piece of content you distribute.
Something worth knowing is that your content doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all nature to it. Sure the core of the content you’re distributing, for example, a blog post, can be the same, but you want to tweak and customize the content before you share it so that it is suitable for the platform you’re repurposing it for.
“The ideal post” looks different for different platforms, so when repurposing, you shouldn’t just copy and paste the caption and content and click post.
You should apporach every platform differently, and that’s exactly what many of the top brands have done. Tweets, for example, work best when they are fun, short, and snappy, while posts Facebook can include a bit more information and text (but not too much though. Moreover, platforms like Instagram and Twitter are places where you should put great emphasize on hashtags, while on Facebook, they aren’t really helping you, and you should do without.
Repost content
If you’re going to repost content, there are a few things you want to have in mind.
First off, you need to make sure that you let some time pass between the first and the second time you share a post. Preferably, at least a few weeks. If you don’t, there’s a risk that a lot of people will have already seen it and maybe even choose to unfollow you.
If you posted something a year ago and want to post it again now, you can absolutely do so. Chances are, you’ve accumulated lots of new followers since then, and that means they haven’t seen it, and that they can gain value from it. When you’re going to repurpose content from a long time ago, you want to factor in the fact that you (hopefully and probably) had fewer followers back then, thus giving your post less engagement.
Why does this matter?
It matters because when you look at the best performing posts, an old post that generated incredible results based on that time’s conditions will probably not show up at the top, just because the posts that you posted more recently performs better due to the simple fact that you’ve accumulated more followers, and this is something you want to bring into the equation.
In other words, just because a post is located further down the list of top-performing posts doesn’t mean that it is actually worse. It might just have been posted a long time ago when it had completely different conditions.
The good news?
The good news with reposting content is that it gives the people who have missed it a second chance to see it, and hopefully get impacted by it in one way or another. Every time you share a post on social media, you can be sure that a lot of people won’t see it for different reasons.
Some people maybe didn’t have time to check social media at the time you posted it, for others, the algorithm on the platform you shared it might have decided that your post just wasn’t relevant to them.
This means that when you share the post again, you give more people the opportunity to see it and get something from it. In other words, you’re cramming out the last drop of marketing juice from your post by reposting it.
Post at different times
A reason that people miss your posts can be that you posted it at the “wrong time”, a time when they weren’t online. That’s why you want to think about the time of which you share the piece of repurposed content to get the most out of it.
If the first time you mae the post was at 5 pm, try posting it at 10 or even 12. This can help you reach the people who are active at different times than when you first posted it, but also decrease the number of people who have already seen the post to see it again.
Moreover, something you also want to factor in is “the best times to post”.
There are tons of statistics, graphs, and charts presenting you with the best times to post down to the minute and day across the different platforms, but to be completely honest, I am not all for that, and I believe you should look at them with a large pinch of salt.
Why?
The reason why is that all accounts are different, and have different followers. This means that the best time to post for one person might be the worst time to post for you in order to reach the maximum engagements and eyeballs.
You can’t compare the best time to post with someone whose majority of followers are located in Texas when the majority of followers are from Europe. Makes sence, right?
There are tons of tools you can use to see when your followers are most active. Instagram Insights and Facebook Analytics are two great examples.
Here’s when my followers on Instagram are most active on Fridays:
However, this does not mean that that is the ultimate time for me to post on Facebook, for example.
Change the caption
The thing most people are most eager to repurpose is visual content, and this is due to the simple reason that it takes the most time and effort to create.
So why not write a completely new caption to give your piece of content new appeal, make it look like a completely new piece of content, but also to add more value to your post?
If you want to repurpose a blog post that you shared earlier where your caption only was the headline, why not share the first few paragraphs from the post to spark interest and entice people to read more?
Writing a few lines is usually far easier than creating a completely new piece of content but still, it can do a lot to your repurposed post.
Change the format of your content
This point demands a little bit more work than the other ones, but the result is a piece of content that seems brand new. in other words, you’re giving new life to your content but the core of it still remains the same.
This can be done in a variety of different ways, but the idea of it is to repurpose the core of a post but present it in a completely new way.
Let’s say that you’ve shared a quote or short text on Twitter:
In a matter of minutes, you can transform that quote into a stunning visual:
Simple, right?
It can even be so simple as making a collage of some of your top posts.
Repurposing doesn’t have to be that difficult.
