How To Repurpose Content For Social Media, Blogs, And Emails in 2022
You didn't start your business to become a content creator, yet here you are asking yourself, “How the hell am I going to find the time to create all this content I need to market my business?”
Content repurposing helps you squeeze all the life out of your existing content—to get every morsel of value from it so that you aren’t constantly having to create new content. Learning how to repurpose content is going to save you a lot of time, money, and hassle as you’re able to recycle what you’ve already spent your time and brain power creating.
Let’s dive into what content repurposing is and how to repurpose content for social media, blog posts, and emails.
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing is when you take existing content and turn it into new pieces of content for different channels. You can repurpose content into new blog posts, podcast episodes, short videos, whitepapers, visual content, social media content, and even PowerPoint or Slideshare presentations.
For example, let’s say you already have a lot of high-quality content on your podcast. You can take those podcast episodes and repurpose them into new blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts, an email series, and more. While the new posts won’t be exactly the same as the original content, you aren’t starting from scratch because you have plenty of material to recycle.
This graphic from Semrush shows you all the different types of content you can repurpose.
Repurposing content allows you to save time and money on your content marketing while bringing fresh content to new audiences. It takes far less time to recycle a piece of content than to create a new piece of content from scratch.
And since the majority of your audience isn’t following you on every digital marketing channel, you’re able to get your valuable content in front of more audiences by reusing it on different channels.
Not to get all meta on you, but you’re currently reading a blog post that was repurposed from a YouTube video. Check it out:
Want more content marketing tips like this? Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more helpful videos like this every Wednesday.
How to Repurpose Social Media Content
You can basically take any larger piece of content and distill down its main points to create a social post.
So let's say you wrote a blog post about five tips on how to stay focused when working from home. You can take each one of those five tips, condense the information, distill down the main points, and create a social post out of each tip.
Then you can create a carousel post that includes all five tips plus the caption gives you a little context around these tips. You can always lead your audience to the original longer post to get more information.
Right there, you just got six social posts out of one longer blog post.
Another even easier way that you can repurpose content into social posts is to use your most popular or best-performing social posts again. Look in your Instagram and Facebook insights to find which posts got the most likes, shares, comments, and saves. Then, take those posts, zhuzh them a little bit, and repost them.
You can basically take the original post word-for-word. Maybe you change the hook, the opening line, grab a new image, and change the CTA so that it makes sense with whatever you're offering now. Then, repost it!
That might sound like cheating, but because of the Facebook and Instagram algorithms (and just the nature of social media in general), only a certain percentage of your audience actually sees the stuff you post. So there's a good chance that not everyone in your target audience saw it the first time around.
(And even if they did see it months ago, they don't remember it. There's a lot of stuff going on on the Internet.)
That's an easy way to literally make a couple of tweaks and repost the content for a fresh social post that will provide value for your audience one more time.
How to Repurpose Content for Blog Posts
When it comes to repurposing content for your own blog posts, there are a few different things you can do. I like to take my best-performing blog content and focus on repurposing these first.
Look at your website and social media analytics to find out which blog posts drove the most traffic, had the most comments, or had the most shares, and then turn that into a blog series.
So let's say your highest-performing old blog post was that post, five tips on how to stay focused when working from home. What you might do is then create a series where each of those five tips gets its own full-blown blog post where you elaborate on that tip, provide more context, more information, and bam! You’ve got 5 new posts!
You can also take old posts that you posted six months to a year ago and update them with new information, update the statistics, and then republish them. A lot of the time you'll see this happening for ”best of” types of content.
For instance, let’s say you’ve got a blog post about the Best Webcams of 2022. Well, when 2023 rolls around, you can easily create a follow-up article without writing new content from scratch. Instead, update the old blog post with new webcams and up-to-date statistics. Then, republish it!
Now you’ve got a brand new post that’s bringing new organic traffic to your site — “The best webcams of 2023.” And all you had to do was update some stuff.
Another really easy way to get more content out of blog posts is to just republish them on Medium and LinkedIn. Wait a couple of weeks between when you publish it on your site and when you publish it on LinkedIn and Medium.
That way Google has a chance to crawl your site, see that you posted the blog post there, and then recognize that your blog post is the original source. (And that's all for SEO reasons.)
Once you’ve repurposed evergreen content for LinkedIn and Medium, you’re now able to reach a new audience without having to create new content pieces.
How to Repurpose Email Marketing Content
A really great way to repurpose content for emails is to create a resource roundup email. This is something I did a lot in my corporate life. Basically, you take whatever content you have around a specific topic and create a resource roundup that’s curated for your audience.
It could include blog posts, videos, webinars, podcast episodes, slideshares, etc. You're basically curating that content, handing it to your audience, and saying, "Here's all my best content on this topic.” This saves them time and hassle because they don't have to do any research themselves on the topic.
That's a really easy way to give new life to your old content, without having to create new content.
Another idea for repurposing for email would be to create a weekly or monthly email newsletter. In that newsletter, you can provide snippets of each piece of content you’ve already created, and provide backlinks to the original piece of content so they can read the whole thing if they want to. This is just another opportunity to share and get eyes on the content you’ve already created.
How to Find Content to Repurpose
Creating a content calendar is not only a great way to make sure that you’re publishing content consistently, but it also allows you to see opportunities to repurpose content. You’ll have a bird’s eye view of all the content you’re creating for the month or quarter. This allows you to see where you might have repurposing opportunities.
Check out my customizable content calendar template on Google Sheets!
Download my really cool, totally FREE content calendar template to help you get started.
It’s all in Google Docs, so you don’t need any special software or accounts to use and customize it.
Make Content Repurposing a Part of Your Marketing Strategy
When you repurpose your content, you’re giving it a whole new life (without doing the work all over again!) The best way to make sure that you are getting the most value out of your content creation time is to make content repurposing a regular part of your content strategy.
For every piece of content you create—whether it’s an email, blog posts, social post, infographic, slide deck, or video content—make sure that you have a plan in place to repurpose that content before you even start creating.
Need help getting started with your content repurposing strategy? Book a Power Hour with me, and we’ll create a plan for you to repurpose your content.
