Even after having literally written the book on social media, I sometimes have trouble keeping my content stream happy and healthy. This stream is one of the most important aspects of your social media strategy - not only does it connect you to existing customers, but it also gives you immediate access to potential prospects. With consistent and excellent content, building trust and expanding your reach will naturally follow.
Don't have the time or resources to create great content on a regular basis? Even if there are brief flashes of brilliance, a lack of consistency could spell disaster. And what happens if you begin to feel like you've already dried up all your best ideas?
Solution: Repurposing great content.
The key to consistently awesome content is reusing and recycling content that works and reducing the content that doesn't.
In order to further illustrate the 3 R's of content, I spoke with Beth Henderson, Marketing Coordinator at Likeable Local. Below, she shares how repurposing has optimized 3 key components of content creation and how they can help you too!
1) Time
The old saying 'time is money' is more accurate today than ever before. As a professional, you're busy running a businesses and building your reputation online, so chances are, you rarely have time to come up with completely fresh new ideas. By reusing the content that works you can skip the vital inspiration step and go right to creation and sharing. You can even eliminate the time it takes to continually schedule and post this content by using smart social tools - of course, I'd recommend Likeable Hub, which even has a built-in tweet and LinkedIn post repeating mechanism.
2) Quality
Finding what your audience wants can be both tricky and time-consuming. Then, once you do find content that hits home, continuing to produce enough to supply your audience's demand can cause quality to slip. That's when you need to think about recycling and repurposing what's already working in new ways. Learn from what you've already created and think about how you can adapt it for a new channel or social network. Splice up a larger piece of content into smaller ones. Or, take a great concept from already successful content and apply it to a new situation - don't be afraid to repurpose content from others, either. creating great content together into something new is super valuable. Take a series of tweets or collection of articles and turn them into a blog post.
3) Audience
Have you ever been on the search for some inspirational, educational material but weren't quite in the mood for a lengthy webinar? Sometimes your prospects and fans won't be either - this is a great example of how content in different lengths and forms, and on different channels, can best reach your audience effectively - there's no need to confine your valuable content to only one form. Transform an informative webinar to an easy-to-read blog post. Is there an article that you absolutely love? Make it into a visually-appealing eBook. Want to recap and event that had lots of Twitter activity? Create a "Best Tweets Of" post.
There's no limit to how many different combinations of similar content you can have. Just remember, what your audience likes, and where they consume it, should inform your content strategy. Take a look at the most successful content out there and you'll see it exists in forms suitable for as many people as possible to easily digest. Don't limit your audiences by not creating multiple forms of content.
Join Hubspot and Likeable Local for a live free webinar: How to Repurpose Social Content to Save Time and Maximize Leads. On Thursday, August 6th at 2pm ET / 11am PT HubSpot's Rebeca Corliss and will join me in showing you how to repurpose social content. Can't make it, or missed it? You will still receive the free recording when you register.
What are your thoughts on the three 3 R's? How do you keep your content stream healthy? Tell me in the comments section below
Main image via Shutterstock