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I was away in the US recently for a combined business trip and retreat with my husband. While away, I wasn’t creating content every day like I usually do. It’ll be the same for the rest of this week too as I’ll be busy running my own retreat. With this in mind, and also knowing that many of you worry about the algorithms and your audience forgetting about you if you take time away, today I’m sharing some ideas on how to make your content work harder for you by sharing it in different ways. These tips will help take away some of the usual daily pressure to always be creating and allow you to keep showing up without so much effort, either when you’re away, when you’re unwell or if you’re having an ‘off’ day.
1) Don’t be afraid to reshare your content
It is totally fine to reshare content you’ve shared before! You might have had a couple of posts that have performed extra well and so why deprive new people to your audience from seeing such wonderful content?! If you’re resharing it to the same platform, leave it for a few months and share it at a different time of day, to give the most chance of different people seeing it.
Remember that not everyone sees all your posts and even if some of your followers saw it the first time around, they’re unlikely to remember it the second and third times.
If the thought of resharing content makes you nervous, take a little time to think about how you could reformat it slightly. Could you word it differently, add a different image, take the points from a written post and record yourself talking through them in a short video perhaps? Don’t spend ages on it. The whole point of resharing occasionally is to save time.
2) Store your posts somewhere you can find them easily
Copy and paste the text of each of your social media posts into an app like Trello or Asana so you can easily find and search for those you want to share again. Use one card per post and then group them into themes by using the list feature to make it even easier. You might find that saving your posts in lists sets off ideas for completely new posts too!
Don’t forget that you can also save all the other parts of your posts (like photos, graphics, videos, and documents) alongside the text on each card so you can use them again in future too.
Using a tool like Trello or Asana to keep a record of your posts saves so much time on scrolling through your feeds to find things you want to reshare. I remember a friend of mine told me she’d shared a video on LinkedIn two or three years ago that she wanted to send to a new client. It took her two minutes to find it in Trello! She’d probably have given up and remade it if she had to scroll back through LinkedIn. Who doesn’t love a time-saver like that?!
There are free versions of Trello and Asana which will be suitable for saving your posts. They’re available on desktop and mobile so you can access them on the move too.
If you don’t currently save your posts, think about starting now. It’s worth knowing that some VAs offer a paid service where they’ll go back through your feeds and copy and paste all your posts into a Trello board for you if you think that would be useful.
3) Repurpose your content
Creating content is a time-intensive activity. Some days it’s really hard, right? Content repurposing is a way to get maximum mileage out of every piece of content you create.
Not sure what content repurposing is?
Let’s take Harry Potter as an example. 🧙♂️ ⚡
Harry was first introduced in the now-famous books read by millions of children worldwide. But how many million other non-readers do you think got to know him through the films, merchandise, theme parks and studio experiences?
Had the iconic stories not been repurposed into multiple different formats, millions of people would’ve missed out on all the fun.
It’s the same with your content. If you only share content on social media, for example, SO MANY people are potentially missing out on seeing your stuff and you’re missing out on potential sales.
If you create lots of different content across different socials, write newsletters and blogs, and create videos for YouTube, I’m betting that it’s exhausting and doesn’t happen all that often because it takes so much time and effort. However, with a little bit of creativity and acceptance that done is better than perfect (i.e., you don’t have to share brand-new stuff everywhere), you can repurpose content, so it works harder for you.
Let’s take Rachel, my imaginary Personal Stylist friend. She has a free Facebook group where she goes live every couple of weeks to talk to her members about a particular topic. This week she gave a heap of tips about ways to transition your wardrobe for the autumn and get more mileage out of your clothes. The conversation and Q&A lasted about an hour and so many fantastic points were covered.
To get more mileage out of this content Rachel:
1) Downloads the video from Facebook and uploads it to her YouTube channel. Boom! She’s already doubled her exposure, and it took less than five minutes of effort.
2) Uploads a copy of the video to Rev where the audio is transcribed. She then uses a bit of brain power to pick out the main points of the discussion and structure the transcription which she uploads as a blog post to her website, adding an image for interest.
3) Tops and tails the main discussion points from the blog with a bit about what she’s been up to over the past few weeks and gives details of any offers she’s got for her audience and sends it as a newsletter to the subscribers on her mailing list.
4) Takes each of the main discussion points from the blog and copies and pastes them over into a series of Facebook posts which she accompanies with an image or Canva-created graphic and schedules to be shared one a day over the next week. Because she’s linked up her Facebook and Instagram accounts, the posts will be shared to her Instagram account at the same time.
As Rachel’s business grows, she can work with a VA to sort out the repurposing for her and could add additional things to reach even more people. Things like:
– Copying each new blog post onto Medium
– Copying each newsletter sent to subscribers into a LinkedIn newsletter
– Creating images and pins on Pinterest to drive more traffic to each blog post on her website
– Uploading the audio from each Facebook live session to her podcast.
The possibilities are endless!
By repurposing your content, you expand your reach and take some pressure off from having to always think of new ideas. With some preparation and scheduling, you could set things up so that content continues to be shared while you’re away on your holidays if you wanted to. Although, it’s OK to completely switch off instead!
What do you think about content repurposing? Will you try it?