Have you ever thought about reusing social media and marketing content? It won’t save the planet, but it could do wonders for content engagement and profits.
Although this may not save Earth, it provides many other benefits to inventors that should not be overlooked. In fact, recycling your content can be a great way to promote your invention, increase sales and boost your success. Consider these benefits:
- Saves time. When you reuse, repurpose and recycle older content, you’ll save time creating content calendars, writing blogs and articles, scheduling social media posts and much more, because you’ll be working with content that already exists instead of creating content from scratch.
- Helps beat writer’s block. Unsure of what to write about? Stuck about 100 words into writing a blog post? Reusing old content can help! There are many ways to take content you’ve previously created and use it to inspire new content.
- Helps improve quality and results. One way to repurpose old content is to revisit content you’ve already written and look for ways to make it even better. Constant review and revision is key to producing good marketing content, and getting the results you need to sell your invention.
- Helps increase content’s value. When you put time and energy into producing great content, you’ll want to have as many people as possible see it. Reusing this content and promoting it in multiple ways on multiple channels is a great way to ensure that your content gets in front of the right people and provides the most value for you.
But how can you effectively recycle this content? Here are seven ways.
- Post the same content across all of your channels, but change it up some. Posting something on Facebook? Go ahead and share it on Twitter and any of your other social networks. However, be sure to tweak it a bit to better fit each platform. For example, add a hashtag for Twitter, or make it a bit more formal for LinkedIn.
- Share others’ content. If your business got some great press coverage, post a link to the article on your social networks. If you read an interesting blog post that your audience would enjoy, share it with followers. Twitter makes it especially easy to share content from other businesses or publications using retweets, but you can also share posts on Facebook or repost pictures on Instagram using a variety of apps. Just think critically about whose content you are sharing; you probably would not want to share content produced by your competition!
- Repost your top content. If you post something on your social media channels that performs well and gets a high level of engagement, give it a few days and share it again. Does it perform well the second time around? Share it once more in a few weeks. Good engagement on social media helps you grow your invention’s social media presence, so don’t shy away from reposting content. Just don’t do it too frequently, and break it up by posting a wide variety of content.
- Use the content that performs well to inspire other content. Suppose you post on Facebook linking to a particular blog post, and that post gets great engagement. Consider posting a link to the same blog post on your other social networks, or look at what similar blog posts you can also link to on Facebook. Or, suppose you write a blog post detailing one use case for your invention, and it receives a lot of traffic. Can you write another blog post about a different use case for your invention? Always be on the lookout for how your existing content about your invention can inspire future content about it.
- Repurpose content in one format for another format. Think of all the different types of digital marketing content that exist: blog posts, social media posts, website copy, guides, infographics, white papers, free downloads and more. Take content you’ve already written for one format, and consider how you can use it for another format. For example, a blog post focused on numbers and statistics could make a great infographic, and vice versa. You may be able to take some practical pointers in an guide and use them to create a free download for your website. Some quotes from one of your most highly trafficked blog posts may make great tweets.
- Update your old content. Is the best-performing content on your site several years old? It may be time for an update. Go through your older, high-performing content to see what needs updating. Look for outdated statistics, inaccurate facts and any other information that may need to be freshened up. Check for broken links as well, and consider updating your title tag or meta description. One thing you should never change is the content’s URL. Google and other search engines have your content indexed by URL, and changing it could hurt the page’s performance.
- Look for opportunities to expand on previous content. Can you write a follow-up to one of your top-performing content pieces? Turn a short blog post into a lengthy guide? Use responses to a question posed on social media to write a new blog post? Look for opportunities to reuse your best-performing content and create new, lengthier or expanded content that your invention’s audience will love.
This article originally appeared in the April 2018 print edition of Inventors Digest.
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