Written by Rose Souders

Spent three hours writing a blog post, posted it once, now not sure if it was worth it? I hear you. Creating valuable content on a schedule can feel like feeding the machine. If you’re feeling this way, then you probably need to revisit why you’re creating content and how repurposing content can work for you (yes, it can!)

To avoid the “create and post once” scenario, repurposing content should be a priority and added to your content workflows. Here are a variety of ways you can repurpose and get the most of your blog, video, social media, and photo content.

Repurposing Blog Content

Creating blog content can take anywhere from 2-4+ hours depending on the level of research and length of the piece you’re creating. Publishing to your website and leaving it be is a real missed opportunity. You can repurpose your blogs by…

Use blog content for newsletter copy.

If you’re sending off an email newsletter, try using the intro of your blog, the conclusion of your blog, or even a specific sentence or two from your blog in your newsletter copy. This way you don’t have to write anything new for the newsletter section.

Use your blog content to create listicle-type social media posts.

Most blogs have a structure to them with main takeaways the writer wants the reader to gather after reading the post. You can use this structure or takeaways to create a list-style social media post with a call to action for the viewer to click through to the full blog to read the insights in detail. For example, if I was repurposing this blog to create a listicle-type social media post, it might look something like this:

“Are you a part of the ‘create and post once’ club? Here are some ways you can repurpose that blog that you spent hours writing:

• Use a few sentences of your blog for newsletter copy.
• Use your content to create listicle-type social media posts (like this one!)
• Use one-liners from your blogs to build an FAQ page on your site or as canned responses for customer inquiries.

Learn the details, along with three other ways to repurpose your blog, here: LINK HERE”

Use one-liners from your blogs to build an FAQ page on your site.

If you’re writing a blog, then you’re probably spending a solid amount of time crafting valuable insights, solutions, and answers for your customers and readers. Don’t forget to review the content you’re writing to see if there is anything there that can be repurposed and used on a FAQ page on your site. You can also use these one-liners as canned responses for customer inquiries so that you don’t have to keep rewriting the same answer to repetitive questions.

BONUS: If you’re answering the same question from customers over and over, this is a great opportunity to create a blog on the topic! This way you can send over the link when someone asks and the details are already all there and written out.

For example, Potluck Consulting gets asked a lot “how much does a marketing agency cost” and “other than the scope of work, what else will I get out of our partnership”. We repurposed our email answers into these two blogs/pages and link to them when asked in emails, social media comments, and messages:

• Digital Marketing Services: An Honest Cost Guide
• Why Hire a Digital Marketing Agency? For these Lesser-Known Reasons.

Reshare old blog content to social media and newsletters when it becomes relevant again.

Make sure you have a good grasp of the library of content on your site. When something in the news comes up and you have a piece of content that is relevant to it, re-share it to your social media accounts and in your newsletter.

Important: It’s never okay to exploit a situation in the news that may be painful to others. When I say, “when something becomes relevant”, I’m referring to something like a change in your industry, something fun that’s happening in your locality, etc.

Publish the blog you wrote to your LinkedIn profile as an “Article”.

While publishing content that’s already on your website to another brand’s website would be considered duplicate content in Google’s eyes and therefore negative SEO weight (you don’t want that), publishing your blog posts as articles on LinkedIn are an approved way to get more reach out of your long-form content and allows you to showcase it directly to your network. These articles will display on your profile and can help you in the long run if you ever needed to show expertise, relevance, or writing samples. When you do upload your blog to LinkedIn, remember to hyperlink to your original blog post and website. Also, it’s always a good idea to review the blog and do some light copyediting to make sure that it’s right for the platform. Many business blogs are written from the brand perspective and use “we”. When you’re publishing the article on LinkedIn, it will be attached to your profile and you should be using “I”.

Here’s how to write an article on LinkedIn.

BONUS: If you don’t have time to write a new blog, update an existing blog.

Most people think you have to constantly create new content to improve your SEO rankings. Yes, new content is beneficial. However, updating your existing content is an essential part of your SEO strategy. Google wants to display the most relevant content possible in its search results. If you keep your content updated and add more value to existing pieces over time, you will likely be rewarded. When you do update an existing blog, reshare it on your social media accounts and mention the new info and update.

Repurposing Social Media Content

Use your top-performing organic social posts for Facebook ads.

If you’re regularly checking in on how your organic social media content is performing (I hope you are!), then add it into your workflow to pull the top three performing organic social media posts from that time period. Variations of these posts can easily be repurposed for your Facebook ads. You know it works with your organic audience, so go ahead and test it with your paid ad audiences.

Important: This is different from a “boosted post”. When you decide which organic social media posts you want to test in your ad funnels, make sure you have the image file and copy (text) so that you can build the ad in Facebook Ads Manager. I recommend building the ad in Facebook Ads Manager vs boosting the original post from your Facebook Page. This will allow you to have greater customization with your targeting, budget optimization, and tracking.

You can learn more about the difference between boosted posts and Facebook ads here.

Feature your top-performing organic social posts in your newsletters.

If a post performed exceptionally well on social media, it’s likely that your email subscribers will also find it interesting. You can include this content in your newsletters by referencing the content, linking to the article that was in the post, or even including the entire post in a format that works well for your newsletter layout. I don’t recommend linking to the actual social media post in your newsletter unless the post included a video or some other engaging feature that someone wouldn’t be able to see otherwise.

Break down your Facebook and LinkedIn posts into smaller tweets.

Normally, Facebook and LinkedIn posts are longer in format than a tweet on Twitter. To stretch your content further, you can pull your Facebook and LinkedIn content, shorten them to Twitter’s format, and then publish them on Twitter if you haven’t already. Again, I’ll caution you to make sure that when you’re repurposing content, you’re also formatting the recycled content to the platform you’re publishing it to. Twitter does have a unique format compared to Facebook and LinkedIn, so to get the most engagement out of your tweet, optimize it to that format.

Create an end-of-year blog with your top-performing social media posts.

This idea can get cheesy real fast, so if you’re going to do this, make sure that you actually have information of value to recap that someone would want to read. To write this type of blog, you’re going to want to review your past year of post data, then pull out the top posts for engagement, any trending topics your content discussed in the past year, any big company updates your shared, etc. From this list, you can see what’s viable and interesting to write a blog about.

Repurposing Video Content

Download your Facebook Live videos and upload them to YouTube.

If you’ve dabbled in Live Video on Facebook, don’t forget to download a copy of your video and repurpose it if you can. Not all live videos will stay relevant after they’re live, but many can. If so, download the video and then upload it to your YouTube channel in a special playlist. Don’t forget to write SEO-friendly video titles and descriptions so that your video can be found in YouTube’s search. YouTube is the second largest search engine, behind Google. By uploading your video here and optimizing the title and description, your video will get more reach than just being on Facebook. Put it on both if relevant.

Here’s how to download your previously live video from Facebook.

Embed your YouTube videos into your blog posts.

Ideally, you want every “scroll” of your blog to include a visual to break up your copy. Yes, every scroll! This helps keep people engaged and reading. As you’ve already noticed by reading this blog, Potluck Consulting doesn’t have the capacity to include an image with every scroll, but we do thoughtfully add visuals when we can. You should too. Using your existing YouTube videos is a great way to do so!

When you’re writing blog content, don’t forget to keep your YouTube channel in mind. Give it a review and see if there’s anything there that is relevant to the blog you’re writing. If so, embed it right into the body of your blog! You can even embed a full playlist of videos.

Here’s how to embed a YouTube video or playlist into your blog.

Write a blog based on your YouTube videos.

Take your video and outline the overall theme and main takeaways of it. Voila! There’s your blog structure. Now, go through and write your blog based on what you talked about in the video. It should be easy to do since you already did it, just in a different format.

Important: You CAN pull a transcript of your video and use that as your blog post, or at least a start of it. However, I only recommend using the transcript as a guide or starting point for your blog. Using the original transcript as your entire blog is, in my opinion, pretty lazy. The content is not engaging (because it’s a transcript!). If you are going to use a transcript in your blog workflow, which can save you time, then I really recommend editing and formatting the transcript into a proper blog format. This will not only be more engaging to your readers but structuring it in this way and optimizing it will also be more beneficial for SEO.

Bonus: Don’t forget to embed your video into the blog!

Here’s a great example of a video series repurposed into blog content:

EdTech Authority’s blog 9 Hard-Learned Tips for EdTech Entrepreneurs – Lessons from Mekumi CEO Sarah Jabeen

Repurpose your long-form videos into shorter clips.

In almost every video, there’s a nice clip (usually multiple!) that you can trim and reuse. When you’re creating your long-form videos, don’t forget to give the video a final once over to look for these clip opportunities. You can use clips in social media posts and paid social ads. Ads with video usually do especially well and depending on your ad type, can be more effective than a regular image ad. Using video content that already exists is a really cost-effective way to test this option for your brand.

Pull the audio from your videos and consider creating a podcast.

I’m not saying that a podcast is as easy as just uploading an audio file. It’s not, and in a similar way that putting a video transcript on your blog is not really an engaging blog. However, if you do intend to use the audio of your video for a podcast, you can structure your video and how you say things in a way that also works for podcasts. For example, you wouldn’t want to say, “If you look at the screen here” or “click here” if you’re going to upload the audio. Anyone listening to the podcast or audio version would have no clue what you’re referencing to.

Pull quotes from your video and use them on social media.

This can be done in a variety of ways. First, you’re going to want to review your video or transcript and pull out any strong, interesting, or useful quotes. I usually keep an ongoing document of these and build this process into my video production workflow. Once you have your quotes, you can decide how to use them on social media.

Here are some ideas:

• Create a graphic with the words using a tool like Canva.
• Publish text posts on Facebook with the quote (no image).
• Create multiple tweets with the quotes.
• Record short Instagram Story videos of you saying the nugget of wisdom by itself.

BONUS: Use timestamp links from YouTube to send people to the video at a specific start time.

Rather than using the regular YouTube video link on your social media post or newsletter, you can pull a unique link for a specific start time within that video. For example, instead of someone clicking the link and starting the video at 00:00, you can create a link so that when they click, the video will start playing at 05:47. This tactic allows you to reshare the same video multiple times! You can reference a different nugget of wisdom each time.

Here’s how to create a timestamped link for a YouTube video.

Repurposing Images

Cropping already used photos to create “new” photos.

Sourcing and taking new photography are common pain points for marketing teams trying to keep their content fresh. If you’re running out of ideas, try going through your Facebook and Instagram photos to see if there are any photos there that you might be able to crop to create a “new” photo. Generally, the photos that work the best for this scenario are images that are more complex, have multiple people in them, or interesting things in the background.

Take screenshots of your YouTube videos to create photos.

Be careful with this one. If the resolution of the video is too low while you’re taking the screenshot, it will certainly look like a blurry screenshot if you publish it to social media. I recommend using this tactic sparingly and only if you’re not able to get photography.

Go back to see if you shared your Facebook photos on Instagram.

If you’re not a brand that has a regular stream of photography waiting for you, then Instagram is probably a difficult platform for you to manage. One last dash idea to find photography you can use on Instagram is to poke through your last year of Facebook page images and then pull anything that you see that hasn’t been used on Instagram.

Stack already used images at the end of multi-image and carousel posts.

Depending on your brand and product, you may find it strategic to use a lot of multi-image posts. For many brands, this can bring in more engagement than a single image post. However, it’s a tough strategy to keep up with considering the number of images you need to keep it going. If you want to do a multi-image post with three images (because you like the look) but you only have a couple of unused photos available, you can upload the two new photos to the post first, then the final uploaded photo can be a reused one. This ensures that your post does look fresh, while still giving you the 3 image multi-photo post you were looking for.

Create graphics with already used photos in Canva.

Canva is a tool that allows you to easily create social media graphics. It has both a free and paid version. If you’re not a designer, don’t stress. Within the tool are all kinds of marketing-friendly templates that you can open and pop in whatever of your own images and elements that you like. Many of their templates have a designated space for an image to be added. This is a great way to reuse your photography and make it look new at the same time.

You can view a sample of Canva’s Instagram templates here.

Use your featured images from blogs for social media posts.

If you have two different teams creating blog content and social media content, then the social team might not be aware of the photo that’s already being selected for a particular blog. The “featured image” or “post thumbnail” as some call it, is not always visible on the front end of a blog. It’s uploaded and set up on the backend of a blog and in many cases, only shows when the image is being shared to social media as a link post. If your social team is not in the blog creation process, make sure they know how to access the featured image of a blog. This will allow them to download the image from your website, and repurpose it for social media, ads, or even newsletters.

Create an end-of-year blog or newsletter with your milestone images.

Similar to the recap blog listed in the Repurposing Social Media Content section, you can gather a pool of images from staff and social media that tells a story of the company’s adventures over the past year. Pick your favorites and use them to show your community a recap of the company’s year. You can show growth milestones, funny experiences, customer wins, or anything that feels right to you. Don’t worry about creating new imagery for this one, but you can if you want to. People will feel nostalgic and excited to see what you come up with.

What you should remember when repurposing content

When you’re repurposing content, remember, each platform has its own format, and you should customize whatever you’re repurposing to fit that format. While it can be tempting to just copy/paste existing content into a new platform, do spend the time editing your repurposed content to fit. In the end, this will serve you well.

In summary.

Creating content is time-consuming, but there are so many ways to repurpose it to make sure that you get the most out of your investment. With just a little extra time, a few workflows, and consistency, you can turn your initial piece of content into at least two more pieces of content with minimal effort. For the best results, start with a few of the repurposing content ideas above and work them into your regular workflows. In time, you’ll get comfortable with the process and can add in more.