You’ve heard and read more times than you can count how crucial content is to creating and maintaining a successful brand. You’ve probably even repeated it in content you’ve written and conversations you’ve had with clients and industry colleagues.
And although you know you need to be providing several pieces of content to your audience every single day, you physically don’t have the time, energy, or resources to just sit in front of your laptop producing new content all day long.
When you’re short on time and resources (and aren’t we all?), repurposing is your saving grace.
Why You Should Repurpose Content
Repurposing content allows you to be everywhere in the online world and reach consumers you may not have reached when your content was distributed in its original format. Content repurposing also reaches a wider audience due to people’s learning and consumption preferences. Some people enjoy reading, but others would rather watch a video or listen to a podcast to consume the same information.
We all have our preferences and content formats that appeal to our learning styles, and content repurposing saves you time and money while helping you reach a much larger audience.
Where to Find Content to Repurpose
The best and easiest place to find content to repurpose into new formats is your blog. If you’ve been blogging for a while, then you should have plenty of good posts you can tweak into repurposed pieces. Start with content that performed well—review your analytics and social shares to discover which posts did the best—and then you should be able to easily convert them into ‘new content’ that will do just as well, if not better than the original format.
Ways to Repurpose for Social Media Distribution
You can take any format of content and repurpose it into several other formats, like turning client questions into a series of blog posts and then turning those blog posts into an eBook. But in this post, we’re going to go over five ways to repurpose your blog content for social media distribution.
- Infographics
Most people are visual learners. They retain information better when they can see visuals, and they’re more likely to share content if it’s visual content. In fact, approximately 66 percent of social media updates are visual content. Take advantage of this and turn your blog post into a stunning infographic.
- Images
If you don’t have the budget or a designer team member to create an infographic, create some images instead. It’s easy (and cheap) to take a noteworthy statistic or quote from a blog post and turn it into an image to share via your social channels, especially when you utilize one of the many free online design tools that help you create web-friendly visual content.
- Videos
When’s the last time you watched a video someone posted on Facebook? It was probably an hour ago; maybe even less. One-third of online activity is spent watching videos. Video marketing is all the rage these days, so jump on the bandwagon because it’s a guaranteed way to engage audiences, making it a great use of your content marketing budget.
- Slideshow
A slideshow allows you to get a little more in-depth with a blog post. You might be thinking, so does an eBook and we can create a landing page on our site to get contact information and turn consumers into clients with an eBook. Yes, all of that is true; but an eBook takes a lot more time and resources to create whereas a slideshow takes less time and energy but is still a fantastic way to fuse your blog information into a more acceptable content format for consumers that performs well socially.
- Podcast
Are you better at talking than writing? Then podcasting is the repurposing route for you. Taking a blog post topic and turning it into a podcast is a great way to add your own personal touch to the topic and more effectively communicate the message you’re trying to share with your audience. Creating a podcast is also the perfect way to reach busy people like me who don’t have much time to sit and read but can download and listen to a podcast while driving to and from work.
Repurposing your content gives it new life, exposes it to more eyes and new audiences, and saves you time and money while not compromising its quality. It might take a little time to get in the swing of things, but once you do, it’s going to be extremely helpful with your content and social media strategies.
About The Author: Greg Shuey is a co-founder and COO of Stryde, an audience driven content marketing agency. To learn more about Stryde or download their eBook: “Blogging for Business: Start-to-Finish Guide for CMOs”, click here.