For any content marketer, repurposing content effectively is an achievement.
In addition to saving you work by allowing you to get the maximum possible leverage out of old content, repurposing your content can also help you reach new audiences and gain new followers. If you do it correctly, repurposing your content can have a hugely beneficial impact on your business.
In this post, I’ll take a look at how you can retweet and repurpose your content without overdoing it.
Best Practices for Content Repetition
Regardless of which social media platforms you use, there are some general guidelines you should follow when it comes to content repetition. These guidelines help prevent your content from becoming excessively repetitive, which can drive readers away and earn you unwanted “unfollows.” To ensure that you’re recycling your content optimally, consider the best practice for several popular social media platforms.
On Twitter, re-tweeting content is a common practice. In fact, 55 percent of Twitter users repeat their tweets on a regular basis. While re-tweeting can be an effective way to ensure that your entire audience sees a tweet and to gain the maximum amount of traction possible from a tweet, it’s important to ensure that you’re following the best practices for retweeting on the platform.
Studies have found that the second time a post is tweeted out it earns an average of 86 percent as much attention as it did in its first inception. As the retweeting continues, however, the attention the tweet gains steadily declines until it is resting at about 67 percent of its initial attention by tweet number six.
Many people re-tweet to ensure their entire audience base is seeing their content, but research has found that roughly 14 percent of your audience sees the repeated tweet time and time again. This may be part of the reason that the tweet’s engagement levels dip so considerably. While there’s nothing wrong with repeating a tweet to ensure it gets the maximum exposure possible, it’s important to stick to these best practices: don’t push it beyond about six retweets and be sure that you’re breaking up each retweet with plenty of tweets containing fresh new content. This will help keep your account from becoming a retweet factory and will give your followers a reason to stay engaged with your Twitter activity.
While Facebook is a platform that’s more designed for long-form content than the current inception of Twitter, it’s still a place people love to go to repurpose their content. Studies have shown that it’s perfectly acceptable to use Facebook as a platform to repurpose and repeat your content, although it’s a wise idea to abide by some general rules.
As compared to Twitter retweets, repeated Facebook posts lose engagement much faster – an average of a 38 percent decrease in engagement after the first post versus a 14 percent loss on Twitter. This means it’s wise to keep your content repetitions to a bare minimum on Facebook and to only repeat content once or twice when it’s truly necessary. This will help keep your followers engaged and prevent your content from becoming stale and boring.
Instagram is one of the most forgiving platforms for content repurposing, especially thanks to the rise of hashtags like #TBT and #FBF (Throwback Thursday and Flashback Friday, respectively). These hashtags give content creators a license to reuse old photos or content without fear of being repetitive or boring. Some Instagram leaders report reposting content on the platform up to 10 times. If you’re going to do this, however, it’s important to remember a few things.
The first is the importance of spacing. Nobody wants to scroll through an Instagram feed and see the same photo five times in 30 images. Because of this, it’s important to space repurposed images enough that they don’t appear overly repetitive. A good guideline for this is to keep them approximately 50 posts away from one another. The second thing to think about is frequency. You should be waiting at least two weeks before you post a repurposed photo.
The final consideration is the memorability of a post. If the image is incredibly shocking and memorable, it’s likely that you should wait longer than you think you need to in order to post it again. This keeps your existing followers from being alienated by what they view as repetitive content.
Google+
When it comes to repurposing content on Google+, the main thing that you’ll have to remember is that repeating content won’t generally fly. This is due to the fact that Google indexes Google+ posts in essentially the same way that it does websites. Because of this, taking content you’ve published on your website and simply copying and pasting it into a Google+ post time and time again could throw your website and your Google+ posts into competition for rankings – damaging your SEO and confusing the search engine. Because of this, it’s important to focus more on repurposing content (more on this in a moment) on Google+ more than you do on repeating content.
In order to ensure that your Google+ posts aren’t harming your site’s SEO or boring your readers, don’t ever simply copy and paste old content multiple times. Instead, focus on dissecting and renewing old content by focusing on the repurposing guidelines we’re going to give you in a moment
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5 Guidelines for Repurposing Content Correctly
Regardless of whether you choose Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Google+ to repurpose your content, there are a few ways to ensure that the practice doesn’t come back around to bite you. Follow these guidelines for effective content repurposing:
1. Be original: create new headlines
When you write different headlines every time you retweet a piece of content, you can earn yourself double the clicks. This is due to the fact that, while the content itself may not be new, the headline stands out to readers (Even those who saw your first tweet) and, if your repurposing is done correctly, can help incentivize them to click and read.
2. Dissect content into new formats
If you have a piece of content you’ve worked hard on and want to share with your audience again and again, consider changing the format. A great example of this is breaking a long-form blog post up into listicles, a series of tweets, or a serialized run of shorter blog posts. Doing this allows you to maintain the information in your original piece of content while distributing it to your audience in an exciting new format.
3. Turn your content into a SlideShare
Presentations are an effective and actionable way for people to interact with your content. Because of this, turning a blog post or another piece of content into a SlideShare presentation is a great way to get it out and help it reach new audiences. For the best results, keep each slide short, informative, and packed with useful information and statistics. Don’t forget to include visuals — 67 percent of readers are more likely to interact with a presentation that contains images.
4. Turn text-based content into visuals
Did you know that an infographic is 30 times as likely to earn you views, engagement, and traffic than an article or blog? In light of this, it’s clear that turning old blog posts into infographics is a great way to squeeze the maximum amount of leverage out of a post while also giving your readers a compelling visual to share and interact with.
5. Create podcasts from existing content
Fifteen percent of Americans report listening to podcasts that have been created from repurposed blog posts. This number will only continue to grow each year, so it’s clear that now is a great time to repurpose your content by turning blog posts into audio podcasts. Doing this will help you connect with a different group of users while also getting your feet wet in a form of content you may not already be familiar with.
The Case for Repurposed Content
By retweeting, repeating, and repurposing your content, you can get as much traction as possible out of each and every piece of content you create. In addition to saving you time and money, this can help ensure that your hard-won content is reaching your entire audience rather than just a small portion. It can also help ensure you’re distributing your messages effectively.
In order to repurpose content well, however, it’s important to follow a few best practices. By paying attention to how often you can repost content on social media without sacrificing traction and ensuring that you’re following the best practices for repurposing content in different forms, you can ensure that your content is always effective, interesting, and valuable for your readers.
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