7 Ways of Repurposing Content on Social Media for Maximum Results

If you are struggling to create high-quality new content to satisfy your audience, repurposing content could be the solution to all your problems!

Many of us are so focused on creating and publishing piece after piece of content, that we completely forget about all the great content we’ve already produced.

Repurposing content is one of those strategies that every content marketer should be following.

If you’ve been creating content for a while, you have to know that one story can tell dozens more — and therefore bring you tremendous benefit with minimal effort.

In this blog post, you’ll learn 7 ways to recycle your existing content to get the most out of your resources, save you time and reach new audiences.

Ready?

Let’s go!

I. What is repurposing content and why should you do it?

Repurposing content, also known as content recycling, simply means taking existing content and reusing it somewhere else, in a different context. In other words: repurposing content is giving a new life to content you’ve already created. That sounds pretty simple but it can turn out to be tricky sometimes. To make things easier, when producing content, have repurposing in mind, so you’ll be able to slice it into different formats later on.

Repurposing content has considerable benefits. Besides the fact that it saves you a LOT of time, considering that the hard work is already done, repurposing content allows you to reach a completely new audience. Indeed, reformatting your content to other platforms means reaching larger audiences — for example, if you publish an ebook and reuse it as a podcast, you’ll reach people who may never have found the ebook in the first place.

Another benefit of repurposing content is that it boosts SEO! As you may know, search engines have a preference for websites that produce quality content. Repurposing your content will allow you to target the same keywords over and over again — without the risk of duplication. If you consistently publish high-quality content on the same topics, it will improve your ranking and give increased organic visibility to your content.

Limits of repurposing content

As with any marketing strategy, although the benefits are considerable, there are also limits.  When repurposing content, you have to make sure that you clearly understand the purpose of each social media platform — people don’t want to see the same content on Instagram and then see the exact same thing later on, on LinkedIn, right?

There’s nothing worse, in a consumer’s eyes than a brand that clearly doesn’t understand the platform through what they are marketing and keeps posting content that is totally inconsistent with the social media platform.

In order to repurpose content in a clever way, you’ll need to spend time reformatting your content to make it consistent with the different social media platforms — and it could be a limit, especially if you’re part of a small team and don’t have a lot of time on your hands. For example, if you have a Youtube video that you want to reuse on your Instagram Story, you’ll have to rethink it taking into account all the Instagram specificities — the same content but not the same format.

II. How to choose what content to repurpose?

When deciding whether a piece of content is worth repurposing, there are 3 things to look for:

Evergreen content

Evergreen content is content that is continually relevant for readers, regardless of how much time goes  by — that’s usually the best choice for repurposing.

Here are some examples of evergreen content that you could repurpose:

• Case studies
• How-to blog posts/eBooks/Guides
• In-depth research
• …

Most popular content

When choosing content to repurpose, look at your metrics. Check your Google Analytics and your social media management tool to see which posts have performed best over the past months or year. Dig into your old content to find what would be worth repurposing.

Content you can expand on

While searching through your archives to find your most popular, evergreen content, make sure to look for any content pieces you could improve as well. Perhaps an improved piece of content could become evergreen, and therefore be repurposed!

Once you’ve found the right content, the next step is to find how to repurpose it. To do so, we’ve listed 7 creative ways to repurpose your social media content.

Let’s dive in!

Turn tweets into Instagram posts

What would you say if I told you that you can reuse your tweets for other social media platforms?

Indeed, more and more people, mainly social media influencers, are reusing tweets to create Instagram posts or Stories.

Whether it’s your own tweets, your customers’ tweets or event tweets by other accounts that you’ve liked, repurposing your tweets on Instagram is a very good way to bring more context to the message you’re communicating, and engage with your audience (who may not use Twitter).

However, if you want to repurpose your tweets on Instagram, you have to make the image clean and contextual to Instagram. A low quality screenshot simply won’t do these days!

To do so, you can use a tool that will automatically screenshot your tweets and crop them for you.

Twinsta is a free tool, we have created, to help you create unlimited high-quality screenshots to share on your Instagram.

Once your generated tweet is ready, post it on Instagram or schedule it (using our Iconosquare Scheduler).

If you don’t have a content calendar yet, check out this blog post to discover 10 tips to plan your feed ahead of time!

Blog post ➡️ Podcast

If you find an old blog post or, even an eBook, that contains content you can expand on, you could turn it into podcast episodes.

More and more, people are preferring to  listen to their content rather than reading it, as this is easier to digest. Moreover, podcasts are more easily accessible as they are openly available on platforms such as Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast and listeners can consume them on the go.

Aside from being easily accessible and consumable, podcasts are, above all, authentic content — and that has already seduced many professionals. Audio content, especially a podcast episode, will allow you to expand on the information you’re offering, and provide more updated facts than in your original content.

To turn your blog posts into podcasts you can use an audio automatic tool like Amazon Polly — a cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech — or you could do it yourself. The advantage of the automatic tool is that it’s faster and easier, but the result obtained with the tool will obviously be of a lower quality than what you can produce by doing it yourself.

Podcast ➡️ Blog post

If, on the contrary, you already produce podcasts, I’ve another possibility for you.

Producing podcasts, as I’ve said, is tough. So to maximize your ROI, you need to get more out of your podcast episodes and spread the content to more people than just your podcast audience.

How?

That’s right! By turning your audio content to text content — more specifically, blog posts!  

This way people who prefer to read have a chance to engage with your podcast via another type of content. Reaching new audiences is not the only benefit, turning your podcast into blog posts can also help your SEO — in fact, search engines can’t scroll your audio content, so creating a blog post will help your ranking.

Hopefully, with today’s technology, you can do this with minimal effort through transcription. You can use tools like Play (for WordPress),  Temi and Readio. Currently in development, Readio allows you to add subtitles to your videos and includes the ability to transcribe audio files to text.

Remodel your best content into quotes

Quotes, when used wisely, are a very good way to engage with your audience on social media.

You don’t have to be always promotional on social media, actually, it’s quite the opposite.

If you are always posting promotional content, it may turn out to be counterproductive, and you may see your results drop. You need to find the right balance between promotional content and entertaining content.

Nowadays, people want to see content that is informative but also inspirational, positive and humoristic. Integrating posts like quotes could contribute to your strategy in a positive way.

That’s why remodeling your content into a quote that helps convey the meaning of the entire content piece is a smart way of repurposing content. It could be quotes from your blog posts, case studies, presentations, etc.

On his Instagram account, Gary Vaynerchuk does a good job of publishing quotes and using the tag CTA to generate maximum engagement.

Create memes

Memes are EVERYWHERE! If you want to engage your community in a fun way and increase shares, memes are the key.

But how can they help you with content repurposing?

Well, that’s easy. Let’s imagine you’ve created a blog post that isn’t getting a lot of views. To spread the word to your followers and increase its visibility, you can reintroduce some important information in a new and fun way by using memes!

Even if memes are trending, you need to be careful and only use memes that match with your brand voice and personality — if you don’t want a flop, make sure to maintain brand consistency.

Turn testimonials into social media content

We all know that users are more likely to listen to what other users have to say about a product. That’s why if you’ve received some good testimonials from your customers about your product, you must use this content in your social media strategy.

Using testimonials as social media posts will further reassure people on their purchasing decision as they will see that your business is already trusted by users who resemble them. Another benefit is that testimonials can also improve customer relationships, it shows your community that you care about what they have to say.

At Iconosquare, we always make sure to put our customers in the spotlight by collecting testimonials, mainly from Twitter, and turning them into Instagram posts and Stories (cf #1 tip).

Transform your webinars into video tutorials on social media

Did you host a webinar that was a real success?

Of course, not everyone was able to attend and won’t watch the replay either, so you need to make sure to bring your webinar to as many people as possible.

To do that, you can repurpose your webinar as a Youtube video and make short videos of the best parts to post on social media and drive new visitors to your Youtube video — so you increase your chances of having more attendees at your future webinars.

Conclusion

Repurposing content is a big time-saver for marketers.

As we’ve seen, there are plenty of benefits for SEO, reach, and it will also help you to fill the gaps in your content schedule. Don’t hesitate to go back through your data, find your best-performing content and transform it into something new, while adding value to the original content.

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