How to repurpose your content

I had Covid the other week. It was most unpleasant and meant I had to take some time off work. I felt completely unable to write anything for the magazine, create social media posts or respond to emails. Thankfully I was better in a few days and able to catch up on everything quite quickly, but it did make me think about the difficulties of creating good quality content from scratch when you’re not feeling 100%, and how it can be made easier. Specifically, I was thinking about repurposing content.

Repurposing content basically involves using the same information in as many different ways as possible. For example, one blog post can easily be split down into several social media captions and a newsletter entry. But how does this work in practice? Will your audience not find it repetitive and tune out?

It’s true that if not done well then the repurposing of content can end up being simply the sharing of the same information over and over again, which is not the idea at all! A key to avoiding this and getting it right is to be aware from the start of the different ways you want to use the content. Let’s say you’ve written a blog post — knowing you’d like to get three social media posts out of it will mean that you don’t just post the whole thing to LinkedIn in one go. Instead, your first post might be purely to inform your audience that a new blog article is live and the general subject, your second post might be an excerpt of a paragraph or two from the post itself, and your third post might sum up your conclusion and ask for comments/opinions.

Each of these three social media posts leads back to the same main piece of content (the blog article) but doesn’t feel repetitive because you’re highlighting something different each time. The comments you receive on social media may also provide a different angle on the topic themselves, something you can perhaps explore more fully in your next newsletter, along with a link to read the original article.

Another important point to bear in mind is that it’s extremely unlikely that the majority of your followers will see everything you put out there on social media. So, in actual fact, you’re probably just making it less likely that they’ll miss your content altogether rather than boring them with repeated mentions.

But what if you don’t write a blog? Well, firstly,  you might want to consider it! Blogs are good for website SEO and directing traffic to your site as well, and it can actually be less time consuming to write one major piece of content a month than lots of little ones. But if blogging really isn’t for you, that doesn’t mean you’ll never find it useful to repurpose content. For example, if you sell products online and have written a description for your website, could you use that on social media or in your newsletter as well? If last year you wrote an extra long caption on Instagram about how you feel about Black Friday, could that be reposted (with a few tweaks) this year?

Even when we use the same general social media post on multiple different platforms, we are repurposing content to make sure we get the fullest use out of what we’ve created. And once we get into the habit of considering all the different ways we can do so, it becomes much easier.

If you’re in need of help with content creation or a marketing plan, do get in touch.