Repurpose Your Blog Content

How to Repurpose Your Content for Your Favorite Social Media Platforms

Do you feel like you’re on the content creation hamster wheel? Especially when it comes to social media? If so, you need to learn how to repurpose your content for your favorite social media platforms so that you can spend less time in the creation process and more time marketing your website, selling your products, or playing catch-up on administrative tasks.

Social media is essential to growing your business online. Globally, there are over 2.7 billion active social media users. To grow your brand, you need to be across several channels and be posting regularly. So what’s a blogger to do? Read on for our top solutions for how to get the most bang for your buck out of your content!

What is Repurposing and How Does it Save You Time?

Repurposing content is the art of using content you’ve already created (like a blog post) to serve a different purpose. It saves you time because rather than spending time working on something new, you simply work with content you already have.

Repurposing your content on your social media platforms is a way to extend your reach, increase your traffic, and get the most value out of your content. But, you can’t just share the same thing on every platform. You need to tailor your content to the platform you’re on.

Here’re some tips on how to repurpose your content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

How to Repurpose Content for Facebook

If you’re on any social platform, it’s probably Facebook. Facebook is a huge platform for marketers with over 1.8 billion active monthly users.

So, how do you repurpose content for Facebook?

Use Polls to Encourage Engagement

Quizzes are a wildly successful lead generation tool. People love to test their knowledge. You can tap into that motivation by creating a poll on your Facebook Page or even in a group (though make sure you check the rules as many prohibit self-promotion).

Write a short teaser to introduce your poll. The questions you ask should be related to the main takeaway of your blog post. Give a handful of answers for people to choose from and close with a link to your blog post where they can find the answer.

Go Live on Video

Facebook algorithm changes are a real fear of many marketers. However, as of right now, if you’re doing live video on Facebook you get a boost in visibility. So, why not do a quick Facebook Live about your blog post? You can share the takeaway or expand on one or two points while directing people back to your blog post.

Start a Conversation in a Group

If you’re a member of an engaged Facebook group, try starting a conversation that relates to the topic of your blog post. For example, you might ask for opinions on a topic, or you might even create a poll. If you aren’t allowed to directly share your links, or if your Facebook profile is linked to your Business Page, interested people will still be able to find you and your site.

Repurposing Content for Twitter

Twitter is a very different social media platform to Facebook with less active monthly users.

It’s extremely fast moving and you can repeat your tweet multiple times to reach different followers. Research by Tom Tunguz showed that when repeating a tweet, each repeat produced about 75% retweets compared to the previous tweet.

So, how do you leverage your current content and repurpose it for Twitter?

Tweet-Worthy Snippets

When you’re writing your post, keep an eye out for interesting facts, figures, or opinions that would make a tweet-worthy sound bite.

You can add one or two to your post as click-to-tweets. If you haven’t come across these before, basically you add a quote or an image that, when clicked, automatically prefills a Tweet for your visitor to post.

Here’s an example of what a click-to-tweet may look like:

Click to Tweet example

Apart from adding one or two click-to-tweets, you can use the other interesting snippets you come up with to create compelling tweets to add to your promotion schedule for your blog post. That way you can promote the same content more frequently without looking like you’re repeating yourself.

Leveraging Images and Hashtags

What makes a great tweet? One with an image and a hashtag (or two).

Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets and tweets with one or two hashtags receive up to twice the engagement as those without.

The optimal image size for Twitter is 1024 x 512 pixels. You can:

  • Repurpose images from your blog
  • Create new images using a free tool like Canva or PicMonkey
  • Create and share an infographic

For hashtags, why not make a short list of hashtags that are relevant to your content and change them up with each tweet? By sharing different tweets with different hashtags, you can potentially reach more people.

How to Repurpose Your Content for Instagram

Instagram is one platform that’s all about the visuals. There’s photos, videos, Stories, or live video to make the most of.

It’s also a platform that’s extremely popular with millennials. Of the 600 million monthly active users, over 90% fall into the 18-35 year old demographic.

So, how do you repurpose your content for Instagram?

Use Your Images

Instagram is known for being the place for carefully manicured and polished images, a reputation they are trying to leave behind according to Kevin Systrom, co-founder, and CEO of Instagram. With their new Stories and Live video features, Instagram is trying to “lower the bar for sharing all types of photos and video — and not just the carefully planned and painstakingly touched-up photographs that are typical of the service.”

Ideal images for Instagram are square, around 1048 x 1048 pixels. You could:

  • Use your featured image, cropped to size.
  • Use images from your blog post.
  • Create a new graphic with a takeaway, quote, tip, or intriguing question overlaid in text.

The Power of Video

Like Facebook, Instagram has rolled out live video. Unlike Facebook, Instagram’s live video is ephemeral. Once the broadcast ends, it’s gone.

While that does limit the use of live video somewhat, live video can still be a great way to connect with your fans.

Instagram also allows you to upload short video clips of up to 60-seconds in length. A great example of this in action is Fit Men Cook. Kevin shares simple recipes in video form to inspire his audience towards healthy eating.

Fit Men Cook

Don’t Forget Your Captions

Do you run out of ideas for what to say on your Instagram captions? Repurposing your content can help with that. Rather than trying to come up with something entirely new you can reuse key points from your blog post.

Repurposing for Pinterest

Pinterest is a powerhouse for traffic: it drives around 5% of all referral traffic to websites, a number that is only tipped to rise.

The first thing you need to know is that Pinterest-optimized images are a necessity. That means you need to have images that are:

If you’re worried that your niche isn’t very visual and you don’t have anything attractive to present, you can use stock photos or simply use text on a plain background.

So, how do you repurpose your content to get results from Pinterest?

Use Your Images

You can easily create a Pinterest optimized graphic out of your featured image or one or more images from your blog post.

If you’re using square or wide images you might need to either crop down, make a multiple image pin (like an instructographic), or add a block of color above or below the image where you can put your headline text.

Here’s an example of a pin that uses a stock photo and a color block:

Stock Photo/Color Block Pinterest Image

Getting Descriptive

A key part of a Pinterest pin is the description. This is your chance to write a compelling enticement for people to come and visit your blog.

Hit on the pain points your blog post targets and let people know that you have a solution. Finish with a call to action to visit your blog.

Inform with Infographics

Infographics are the ultimate way to repurpose your content graphically. And they’re quite popular on Pinterest, many receiving tens of thousands of repins.

But you might not get as much traffic as you expect from an infographic. If all the information is displayed on the infographic, there’s no incentive for viewers to click through and read it on your site. However, infographics are still good to build your credibility and they can be repurposed in so many ways.

Instruct with Instructographics

Instructographics are created from multiple images that are combined into one graphic to show the steps of a project or recipe.  Instructographics are often seen in the craft, DIY, and food niches. Repurposing your blog content into an instructographic is easy if you have multiple images of different stages of your project or recipe. Use a free photo editing tool like Canva or PicMonkey to stack images and then add whatever additional text you like to the image.

Wrapping it up

There you have it! From one content source, you can create an almost endless stream of social media content. Too often, a blog post is published and then never used again, wasting its potential.

Creating new content takes a lot of time and energy. Repurposing your content will save you time and also helps you get the maximum value out of each piece of content.

Over to you – are you repurposing your content on your social media channels?

This post may contain affiliate links, which means Nimbus Themes may receive compensation if you make a purchase using these links.

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About the Author

Cath Oneissy is a freelance writer for hire, specializing in digital marketing and social media. She works closely with B2B companies looking to increase their visibility through engaging and actionable content.

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2 Comments

  1. divp Avatar

    divp

    March 30, 2017 at 4:31 am

    Good one thanks for sharing

    Reply
    • Cath Oneissy Avatar

      Cath Oneissy

      March 31, 2017 at 2:04 am

      Thanks for commenting 🙂 I’m glad you enjoyed the post! I hope you’re saving a lot more time with your social media posts now.

      Reply

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