Groundhog Day - How Repetition Can Help You Repurpose Content
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, and while that furry cutie Phil holds in his little paws the prediction for if we'll continue to freeze our butts off or stay in hibernation here in NYC or if we'll see a bit of warmer weather, I want to talk about the other Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and probably your dad's favorite flick. Groundhog Day teaches us about repetition. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. But when it comes to your content creation strategy, repetition can be a huge asset because you can use repetition to help you repurpose your content across multiple channels.
You've probably heard that you shouldn't be posting the same exact content on every platform. And that is true. The way you post content to your Pinterest boards should look different than the content you Tweet. But, as any busy hustler knows, it's freaking hard to create custom content for all of those platforms! How are you supposed to create fresh content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Instastories, Pinterest, your blog, your YouTube channel, AND your podcast? And that doesn't even include the time you need to spend actually working on your product or service!
That's why it's a good idea to take a page out of Bill Murray's book in Groundhog Day. Post the same content over and over but alter it a little bit every time for each platform. So how do you implement that into your content creation strategy?
Exactly what this looks like for your business will depend on what platforms you're on. Here's an example - A client of mine has a blog so we brainstorm, plan, and write blog posts to go on her website. Then, we create custom images for Pinterest that incorporate some of the key points from that blog post, especially if it's written as a list. She's trying to incorporate more Facebook Live videos into her strategy so she will go live to talk elaborate on a couple of the key points from her blog post and to take any questions from her audience. The Facebook Live will get edited and added to her YouTube channel. We will pull out a couple of phrases from the post and add those to relevant LinkedIn groups while asking for input and questions from other people who belong to those groups to promote engagement, while linking back to the original post. Then, we'll create some custom lead capturing content associated with the post topic, then tease that and link to it from Instagram.
While the original blog post turns into 6 or 7 pieces of content that's optimized for different platforms, we're not starting from scratch on any individual channel. We are using the original content (the blog post) that we took extra time to research and write, then we take anywhere from a third to half of the time it took to write the post, to repurpose it into additional content for her social platforms in order to promote that blog post and drive traffic to her site and capture leads.
The benefit of this repetition of the original content topic is that people who followed you on Twitter and people who subscribe to your YouTube channel are both seeing that content and hopefully clicking through to read the original blog post. But someone who has liked your Facebook page and follows you on Instagram isn't getting annoyed because they saw the exact same image and the same post on both platforms within an hour of each other.
The amount of time your content is potentially exposed to users on each platform is also something to consider and it varies from platform to platform. Kissmetrics has a great guide that visually shows how often you should be re-posting content on each platform. For example, they say you should only be sharing content on Facebook a couple of times with about a month between those posts. But on Twitter it's best to post content multiple times the first day and then a day, week, and month after that. So you are posting that content 3x more on Twitter than on Facebook. But be sure to alter each post! You don't want to copy and paste the exact same post every time.
While Groundhog Day teaches us something about the benefits of repetition, when it comes to your content marketing strategy, it's important to tailor your content and adjust your sharing frequency for each platform.
Struggling with your content marketing strategy? Contact me to schedule a free consultation call.
