Recycling Content

It's Global Recycling Day!

It's Global Recycling Day today and we're taking a look at how recycling content can save you time and help you to get your message out to your audience. If you've created content that's interesting and informative to your audience, updating it and re-sharing with your audience is a good idea. You can transform blogs into vlogs or infographics, or use key take-aways for content for your social media channels. Throwing away content that you've worked hard on doesn't help you and it doesn't help your audience, refresh, recycle, reuse!

Recycling Content
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Recycling Content

It can be really tough producing fantastic, innovative, fresh content to share with your followers every day. Sometimes inspiration won’t strike, sometimes there’s just not enough time, you may be just staring out with your business and the demands on your time are huge, whatever the reason, without a team helping you out, creating original content every single day is a tall order.

What is content recycling?

In a nutshell, content recycling is resharing, repurposing and reposting content that you have already shared to your audience. This can be in the same or a different format and may be across the same or different channels.

What it’s not

Content recycling isn’t lazy, it’s not cheating the system. It doesn’t mean serving up the same repetitive content on a loop to your audience nor does it mean taking someone else’s content and altering it so that it fits your brand or message.

How to do it well

Blogs 

Simply resharing old blogs without updating them with any relevant new information won’t win you any awards from your audience. What has changed since you created the content? How has the relevancy changed? Adding some new information, or updating figures, adding quotes or simplifying sections with an infographic does mean that the content has been repurposed and recycled.

You could repurpose blogs into video content or a podcast, the idea was sound when you wrote it and sharing it in different ways may make it accessible to a wider audience.

You could also take key ideas, information or quotes from the blog and turn these into social media posts linking back to the blog if you are on a platform that allows you to.  You can turn your blog into a discussion with a poll on Instagram or Twitter to generate conversation with your audience.

Social Media 

The same content can be shared in multiple formats depending on your platform or audience. If you are sharing on Facebook or Instagram you may consider paying to advertise to ensure more visibility. Also you need to be cross posting on various social channels, again this will boost the reach of your message. Consider whether your content is ‘evergreen’? Essentially this means is it still relevant and useful eg a list of terminology or a beginners guide to, do however be aware that even these may need tweaking to remain relevant. Evergreen content is a good slow burner to build engagement, current hot topics will garner a quicker engagement but sharing evergreen in between will keep you an informative and consistent presence.

Content Library & Calendar

A content library and calendar are the best way to keep on top of your socials for many reasons;

1. You can track older posts to see if they had good engagement. No point in reposting or repurposing something that didn’t hit the mark.

2. You can repost at relevant times of the year eg ‘is your car prepared for winter’ or ‘time to spring clean your kitchen’ and you can just tweak posts as you know exactly what you said last year. It will also remind you of key dates in advance so you can repost or create new content in good time.

3. You can milestone posts – ‘was it really 3 years ago today that John joined our team’ etc.

4. You can share posts at different times of the day/week on different platforms and track which ones are working best for you.

5. It will help you keep your feed active (consistency is key). It is easy to fall off the radar if you are not posting regularly and can even lead to losing followers. A simple plan utilising a good mix of fresh and recycled content will keep your audience engaged.

6. There are plenty of tools to help you manage your social media, some of the best available are explained in this article Social Media Tools for 2022

Key Points

The key points to take away if you are going to recycle content are:

  • Collate – Go through your previous posts and blogs and select content that is suitable/interesting and relevant.
  • Update – make sure information is current & correct, you may want to add some new imagery to freshen it up. Check any links are still working and maybe add some new ones too.
  • Promote – if you have updated a blog, make sure you post about it on your social platforms. Use content on all platforms.
  • Track – check the engagement, you may find that by adding a new key word your engagement has increased.

If you’re a new business,  read our  Top Tips for Social Media to help you get started on building your presence, or contact us about our social media training services.

 

 

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