Many moons ago I went to high school with a fabulous artist Daniel Clemment who finds materials and creates the most incredible sculptures out of them. I’ve always been in awe of his resourcefulness and there are others who are doing the same thing on an even grander scale.
Beyond Retro is a vintage retailer. They gather vintage pieces and sort through thousands and thousands of pieces to find the few that are worthy of the shop. But the other pieces aren’t just thrown into a landfill. Instead, they are upcycled into fabrics that are redesigned into new pieces. This is a sustainable business practice and one that’s good for the business and the planet.
Just like great businesses recycle their materials and products, great content creators do the same. And most of us are aware that we need to ‘leverage’ or repurpose our content to get the most value out of it, yet, many of us don’t.
Instead, too often we create a piece of content, pop it onto social media, and then that’s it… until the next week, or month when we do the same thing again. The problem with this approach to content creation is that it takes a lot of work, and achieves very little impact. Then it becomes not sustainable. And soon we find we’re hitting a wall, finding that we don’t have time, energy, or ideas to keep creating content.
Repurposing your content is the better way to create impact, longevity, and sustainability within your practice.
How to Repurpose Content
Leveraging and Distributing Content
The first steps to repurposing content is, of course, capturing your idea and then creating your first piece of content. But if you’ve been posting on social media, you’ve already got this part down. It’s the follow up where things often get lost.
Thomas Edison said, ‘To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. When you repurpose content you’ve already got your pile of ‘junk’ (though hopefully, it’s not really junk). Now you just need to use your imagination.
Instead of distributing it once – for example, through a single social media post – think about all the other places that you could distribute it as well. This could be direct to people in your network, as part of an e-book, in a newsletter, or even as a tweet. There are so many options, and ensuring that you get your content out through all those different platforms means that you create a bigger and better impact.
The Lifespan of Content
When you repurpose your content, you’ll want to keep in mind the lifespan of each platform:
- Blog post = 2 years
- Pinterest post = 4 months
- YouTube videos = 20 days
- LinkedIn post = 24 hours
- Instagram post = 21 hours
- Facebook post = 5 hours
- Tweet on Twitter = 18 minutes
Understanding the lifespan gives you confidence in reusing that piece of content. If you’ve put it on LinkedIn within a day it’s going to be old news, and if you put it on Facebook, it’ll only take a few hours. Using that piece of content again, and again, just gives you more value out of the work that you’ve already done.
50 Places You Can Repurpose Your Content
Here’s a list of 50 places and ways you can repurpose your content. How many of these have you used?
| 1. Website copy | 26. Google My Business |
| 2. Blog posts | 27. Infographic |
| 3. Newsletter | 28. Opt-in |
| 4. Personalised emails | 29. Activity book |
| 5. E-book | 30. Quiz |
| 6. In person | 31. Diagnostic |
| 7. Pinterest | 32. Slideshare |
| 8. YouTube | 33. Facebook group |
| 9. LinkedIn personal | 34. LinkedIn group |
| 10. LinkedIn business | 35. IGTV |
| 11. Instagram | 36. Instagram story |
| 12. Facebook personal | 37. Facebook story |
| 13. Facebook business | 38. Podcast |
| 14. TikTok | 39. Interview |
| 15. Twitter | 40. Case studies |
| 16. Snapchat | 41. Media release |
| 17. Quora | 42. Editorials |
| 18. Whitepaper | 43. Guest blogs |
| 19. App | 44. Influencer outreach |
| 20. Licensing | 45. Follow up emails |
| 21. Medium | 46. Email signature |
| 22. Book | 47. Conduct research |
| 23. Online course | 48. Content-rich job listings |
| 24. Webinar | 49. Google+ post |
| 25. Workshop | 50. Google hangouts on air |
Where to from here….
- Create that core piece of content.
- Consider all the different platforms and things that you can do to repurpose that piece of content.
- Distribute that content with confidence.
I’d love to hear your thoughts….
Jane Anderson is a strategic communications expert, speaker and the author of seven books including the upcoming Catalyst Content. With over 20 years of experience helping people to communicate confidently, she is obsessed with authentic influence and human connection to drive business growth in a world of disruption and automation. She delivers Content Creation Bootcamps (Virtual and Face to Face), Coaching and Keynotes. To inquire about her working with you or your organisation please contact us here.
