What You Need to Know About Repurposing Content for Social Media

Repurposing content for social media is a crucial addition to your content marketing strategy. It maximizes distribution and enhances effectiveness across channels as well as ensures efficiency in content production and development.

Basically, with content repurposing, you treat each high-quality content piece as an asset—adaptable and reworkable for different purposes. For instance, after writing an in-depth blog post, break it down into social media posts, create an infographic, or turn it into a podcast or video–the list continues.

Repurposing tailors content to diverse audience needs, increasing engagement and impact. It also saves time and resources. You leverage the effort invested in quality content, freeing you to focus on analytics and community engagement.

Naturally, repurposing content amplifies distribution, enhances cross-channel effectiveness, and reaches audiences in preferred ways. It’s a win-win you can’t ignore.

The 1-3-5 Method

The 1-3-5 method, as outlined by Justin Welsh in his newsletter , is a strategic framework designed to help creators maximize their output without sacrificing quality. This method involves creating one substantial piece of content and then breaking it down into smaller, digestible pieces. Here’s how it works:

Create One Pillar Piece: Start with a comprehensive piece of content that addresses a significant topic relevant to your audience, such as a detailed blog post or an in-depth video.
Extract Three Core Ideas: Identify three main concepts from your pillar content that can stand alone as valuable insights.
Transform Each Core Idea Into Five Micro Pieces: For each core idea, create five smaller pieces of content. This could include written posts, short videos, carousel posts, and engagement questions.

Have a look at how this goes in the illustration below by Justin Welsh:

This method can help transform one piece of content into 16 different pieces, allowing for a diverse posting schedule that maintains a consistent message. This approach not only saves time but also caters to different audience preferences, enhancing engagement across platforms.

Now, let me break down for you the different specific ways you can repurpose content.

Ways To Repurposing Content

Turn your blog post into an infographic.
Publish it on Pinterest and Twitter.
Connect with bloggers who may be willing to embed it (guest posting).
Make a simplified checklist with a call-to-action for Instagram or Snapchat.
Break it down into actionable steps that could form a presentation for Slideshare.
Explore your other posts that could leverage certain snippets and embed the presentation with a link back to it.
Combine a few of the relevant posts into an ebook for lead generation.
Organize a webinar if the topic is relevant and generates some traction.
Publish it on YouTube or LinkedIn.
Use the same topic for a Facebook Live Q&A if it still receives attention.
Convert the existing video into a new blog post.
Collect all items and form them into a new course (free for leadgen or paid for actual monetization).

With a single piece of content, you can receive tons and tons of exposure, attention, and traffic. This may lead to podcast appearances or interviews for other outlets as well.

However, for repurposing content for social media to be effective, you need to have a clear perspective on how to do it and create a powerful strategy. Failure to do so will render your efforts ineffective. Here is a quick guide on how you can effectively start repurposing content for your social media marketing.

Guide to Effective Content Repurposing

1. Planning is Essential

Initial planning plays a critical role in unleashing the power of repurposing B2B content.

Not every piece is eligible for repurposing. Why?

Some mediums require a specific type of content.
The content form may lack the right structure for repurposing.
The topic may not be suitable outside of the blog itself.
Content may not be evergreen – meaning that repurposing has to happen ASAP or it’s too late.

Listicles, “How to” guides, handy tricks and techniques may work well for the most part. Longer pieces have more to “repurpose” from. Bundling videos and images helps with sharing across other networks as well.

More and more people consume video content on a daily basis. Every minute, 400 hours worth of video content are uploaded on YouTube alone. There are over 1,500 channels reporting over a million subscribers each.

You can get a lot more traction with video and form a personalized relationship with your audience. It’s one thing to read an article by a writer and a completely different experience watching them present it publicly.

2. Consider Your Repurposing Channels

Once the plan is ready, you need to analyze all of your repurposing channels, such as:

LinkedIn
Medium
Quora
YouTube
Other social media accounts
Roundup posts
Social directories

Also, ask yourself:

Is the audience of my side channels the same as my blog’s?

In other words, are you pitching to the same people?

Moreover, what’s the tone of that particular network?

Twitter is short, but powerful – with the right snippets and excerpts.
Instagram and Snapchat are obviously more visual – consider that while preparing the copy.
Video networks have different recommended lengths – Vine kept videos down to merely 6 seconds while 5–10 min may be more suitable for YouTube. Some influencers recommend 2-minute videos for LinkedIn.
Medium is more emotional – you need to spark empathy or bet on humorous content.

A well-crafted, rich copy may be easily reusable right off the bat. Some networks may require recording or rebuilding different snippets instead.

Also, if you’re podcasting, double-check if your content depends too much on references or visuals. This may not work well in a channel that relies solely on voice.

Fire up a new spreadsheet and list all of your noteworthy pieces in the first column.
Create a separate column for every network that you’re targeting.
Prepare some form of a schedule upfront – which piece goes where when.
Combine that with a Google Drive folder where every network has its own subfolder (whenever you’re building new material based off the initial piece).
Set a timeline with recommended posting hours/times for each network.
Add everything in Buffer if possible, or add a bunch of events in a new Google Calendar, or whatever works for you (and helps you execute).

Also, consider titles and description pieces for social networks – How do you decide which parts of your content needs to be repurposed? For example, when using a blogpost to make a Facebook post, do you utilize the headline and a snippet?

7–10 years ago, maintaining one specific channel was enough. That was often a blog or a magazine that led to the vast majority of traffic.

Nowadays, there are simply far too many channels. Professional marketers often spend 20% of their time on content production and 80% on promotion:

Social networks
Repurposing
Content aggregators
Guest post mentions
Press releases
Community platforms
Forums
Republishing on LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, reddit
Influencer marketing
Sharing pods

Reaching the right audience requires consistent work and carefully monitored content calendars for ongoing promotion.

That’s especially valid for evergreen content. You may be able to grow your traffic month-to-month by sharing instead of making a quick win over the first days with a steady decline onward.

3. Strategize for Traffic

In terms of traffic, there are several action points you have to plan for:

Noteworthy copy. Nobody would share if your piece wasn’t outstanding.
Good headlines. I don’t necessarily mean viral or clickbait ones, but headlines that matter to your audience.
Posting hours. Figure out the right time to push content. There are best practices online but your network may be active at different times (plus slower times are often pretty decent).
Initial research & outreach. I’ll cover that in a bit.

You can, of course, mix that with some paid ads for initial traction, along with your email newsletter and other channels that would boost your visibility.

Also, some networks have particular metrics that affect their feeds. For instance, a good volume of comments and likes on LinkedIn within the first hour or two can dramatically increase your visibility across your entire network, and their (LinkedIn) networks subsequently.

It’s known to work for other networks, too – but with various twists you need to study additionally.

The best way to boost traffic is to build a “sharing pod” of sorts for visibility. And there are several groups that you can utilize for this:

Friends and colleagues. Once you go live, ask your internal network to share and interact if possible.
A sharing pod. You can team up with other active folks in your network and mutually interact with each other’s content.
Everyone mentioned in the post. If you mention stats or quotes by influencers, ping them on social media once you’re live or send them an email. Same goes for resources that you link to – it’s still a backlink that will help them.
People who shared similar content. You can use BuzzSumo in order to find people who shared similar content (once you find it first). It’s a brilliant tool that lets you search by keyword or a competitor’s site. SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz can help you identify relevant pieces or other competitor resources that you want to rank for.

It won’t work right away – you have to be persistent. The algorithm takes time to adjust and to study your behavior, habits, and “virality factor”. With time, the more engagements you get with effort, the more organic this would become.

And don’t forget to respond to mentions and comments. Really.

Readers don’t want to interact with automated content – they want to reach out and share their thoughts.

If you’re interacting with them, they will be willing to follow you and chat with you on a regular basis. You’ll become approachable.

You wouldn’t bother interacting with automatically posted content if nobody is monitoring discussions, right?

Social media is one way to build trust.

There are other forms of credibility that clients care about:

Portfolio
Case studies
Public projects you can showcase (some could be open source)
Educational content/guides
Other forms of recognition (such as public speaking, creating a video training course)
Community involvement (in a corresponding technical stack)
Some industry awards (and sometimes, education)

It’s important to determine which half of the sales journey is more important to you:

1. Lead generation

2. Closing the deal

Lead generation is the art of attracting prospects who may convert to customers at a later point. This means “meeting the right audience at the right time or a bit earlier.”

Social media is one of the possible channels that can enable you to accomplish that. Same goes for industry forums or Facebook groups, attending business meetings, offline marketing, tapping into your own network for referrals, cold calling/emailing, and a few others.

Blogging can serve the same purposes as well — especially guest posting to industry journals, solving the right business pain points for your audience. However, can you seal the deal?

Imagine attending an industry meetup with 3 prospects who need the service you offer. And losing out on demonstrating your capabilities or pitching your services properly. You just wasted 3 leads.

Closing the deal is a combination between the right “package” or “offer” backed with the credibility that will assure a customer that you are the right vendor for them.

This is a bit more complicated since it also entails communication and soft skills, sales aptitude, overcoming objections, and other challenges throughout the journey.

But credibility (which I started with) is what will convert an existing lead to a client.

Can you deliver that through social media? Sure, if you manage to build a list of followers who are potential clients, and frequently post about case studies, success stories of projects you’ve built, interviews with customers who are extremely happy with your work, photos of conference talks of you educating other industry peers… Then it works like a charm.

Otherwise, think about the right approach to prepare your social plan before you attempt to invest time on a regular basis on social media.

Content repurposing for social media is all about strategy. It should be part of a bigger content marketing and repurposing strategy in your online marketing campaigns.

Here’s why a strategic approach is essential:

Maximizing Reach: Each social media platform has its unique audience and content formats. By tailoring your repurposed content to suit each platform’s strengths, you can engage a wider audience and increase your brand’s visibility.
Maintaining Consistency: Repurposing content allows you to maintain a consistent brand voice and message across different platforms. This reinforces your brand identity and fosters trust among your audience.
Optimizing Resources: Creating new content from scratch can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Repurposing existing content saves you valuable time and effort, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your marketing strategy.
Driving Engagement: Repurposed content can be used to spark conversations and encourage interaction with your audience. This helps to build a community around your brand and increase customer loyalty.
Improving SEO: Sharing your repurposed content on social media can drive traffic back to your website, boosting your search engine rankings and improving your overall online visibility.

Don’t forget to watch my full The Most Effective Content Marketing and Repurposing Strategy breakdown video for a wider and helpful insight on content repurposing.