Tips to repurpose content, save time, and build your business.
There’s a belief out there that businesses always need to come up with NEW content… all. the. time. Which is exhausting, and also absolutely not true. I mean, what business owner has time for that? So, let’s dig into how to repurpose content – a time saving and strategic way to build your business, provide value and get your time back. Plus grab our content strategy PDF at the end of this post!
How many times have you experienced this: Your day is non-stop and your to-do list still has so many unchecked items that even your pad of paper is feeling the early signs of burnout. You’re out of ideas and uninspired at the thought of posting on social media. But, the pressures of an ever-evolving online world weigh down, so you spend an hour frust-orming ideas (it’s like a frustrated brainstorm), only to scrape together a half-decent post, hit publish, uncork a bottle of red and call it a day. Can you relate?
Here’s the problem… You’re likely hurting your online presence with that one post more than you’re helping your business. Unfortunately, posting just for the sake of posting isn’t actually going to get you sales because it doesn’t provide value for your target audience. So, let’s throw out the “post just to get it off my to do list” concept and reinvigorate your content strategy!
Step 1: Analyze Your Content
Yep, I said it. Always start by taking the temperature of your current content. Look at the last 20-40 posts and separate out the ones that:
- Have performed the best engagement-wise
- Have gotten the most re-shares
- Have more than the usual amount of comments
- Have lots of impressions and views
For example, this whole blog post was inspired by one of Salt’s top posts – an Instagram carousel about repurposing content that got us more shares, followers, and impressions, and on the explore page than any other posts we had made before it.
Why is analyzing so important? Because you won’t want to spend your time repurposing content that people don’t need or deem important.
Step 2: Organize by Category
No, this isn’t just our type-a brains being a little bit extra. This step is really important to ensure you are sharing informative content! Your strategy should have content pillars (topic clusters) that align with your business values and goals, and you’ll want to repurpose content according to each of your topic clusters.
Want more deets on setting the right content pillars? Learn about ’em and outline yours with our Build Your Own Kick-Ass Social Media Content Strategy workbook!
Step 3: Repurpose Your Content
Okay, so now you know what content resonates with your audience and how that content will help you reach your business goals. This is where it gets fun! Now you’re ready to repurpose and save SO. MUCH. TIME! Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- For Your Social Media: Recreate each of your top-performing social media posts one more time as another social post. Why not? You know from your analytics that your audience already values the information, so you’ve got nothing to lose by sharing about it twice! Scatter the publish date over time so that you’re not posting about the same thing too soon.
- Pro tip: Try recreating each post as a different type of content. For example, if you made a reel first, repurpose it as a carousel post next.
- For Your Blog: If you have a blog on your website, make a new blog post to expand on your social post. This will help you gain authority on the subject and let interested readers learn more about how you could serve them if you worked together.
- Pro tip: For all you long-caption-writers out there, use your caption as a starting place for your written blog content. Save yourself some time without needing to write from scratch.
- Pro tip #2: Make a third social media post on this topic specifically to promote your new blog post – it will get followers onto your website (which will increase the visibility of your services, product, testimonials, etc).
- For Your Podcast: If you have a podcast, create an episode around your top-performing social posts. In your episode script, include some related stories, debunk a myth, share pro tips, or answer FAQs around the topic.
- Pro tip: Film your episodes and repurpose the video recordings as reels or video content for your blog.
- Pro tip #2: Can you guess what we’re going to say? Create a third social media post about your podcast episode – who knows, maybe you’ll gain some more followers on Spotify!
- For Your Newsletter: If you have a newsletter, elaborate on the information from a top-performing social post for your email subscribers. You could even give away a subscriber-only freebie or discount for your services if it aligns with the topic. Why? This will make your email readers feel like they are exclusive.
- Pro tip: You already know… Yes, go make another social post to promote your newsletter and announce an exclusive freebie/discount!
Ready, Set, Repurpose
Hopefully this post has inspired you to surf the creative waves of repurposing content! If you act on even just one of the ideas we suggested above, you will have at least two more social media posts plus an extra piece of content (blog, podcast, newsletter, etc). You can always take these a step further and go live on a social platform to talk about your topic of choice, conduct a Q&A around your post in IG stories, make a course or schedule a webinar… really the possibilities are endless.
The most important piece to take away from all of this is that you can expand on content. You don’t always need to craft NEW posts or spend an hour feeling stuck and scratching your brain for ideas. If you want to level up your content strategy even more, download our Build Your Own Kick-Ass Content Strategy workbook to master your social media goals, content pillars, CTAs, hashtags and more. You’ve got this, fellow busy business owner!
