In With the Old — Sharing Reusable Content on Social Media

Coming up with content to satisfy the quick pace and constant posting schedule of social media doesn’t have to be such a struggle. Using old and reusable content as it becomes relevant again or as part of a posting schedule, in addition to content curation, will help you keep up.

Posting your new blog post on Twitter and Facebook on the day it’s published doesn’t guarantee that all or even most of your followers will see it. The average post by a Facebook page only reaches 12.9% of its fans. Maybe they weren’t on Facebook that day. Or maybe they were on Twitter a few hours after your tweet published and it was too far buried in their feed. You could have new followers or followers in different time zones. Whatever the case may be, posting reusable content more than once increases the number of followers that actually see your post.

However, there are some caveats here that you’ll need to consider when re-posting content. All of them boil down to the same theme — put your followers first. Follow these tips to keep your followers satisfied without burning out on content creation.

Provide Value

The key thing to remember when reposting old content is to always add value. You don’t want to post something simply to fill the void or because you were told you had to post a particular number of times per day. Consider your followers, what they come to you for and deliver that.

This is also an opportunity for you to take a look at the original content. Is there information or statistics that can be quickly updated? Did you think of an engaging question to include to encourage comments? Make those updates before you post the article again.

Vary Your Messaging

Your followers won’t mind seeing the same blog post — so long as you have something new to say about it. Some people will have seen your post the first time around, so it’s important to mix up your messaging. That way, even if they have already seen it, they can still reap some sort of benefit. Try out a few different approaches to your messaging to add intrigue and better engage with your followers.

Messaging Options

• Standard post title and link
• Summary of the article
• Interesting fact or stat from the article
• Strong quote from the article
• Engaging question that the article answers

Don’t Spam

Nobody likes to be spammed. Posting the exact same content in the exact same way day after day will set off alarm bells for your followers. Remember the golden rule of re-posting content on social media? Spamming people goes directly against that. They’re following you to keep up to date with your news and updates. If all of your posts are the same, your followers will start to feel cheated and won’t want to follow you anymore.

Follow a Posting Schedule for Reusable Content

To avoid spamming your followers, create a posting schedule that keeps your followers top of mind. For content that is evergreen, meaning that it won’t easily become outdated, post it once it’s published and then once more a few weeks later. It’s best to remove any content that is closely tied to current events and not easily updated to be current from this schedule.

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The goal of your social media effort should always be to best serve your followers. But, as you can see, that doesn’t mean you need to burn yourself out creating less and less useful content. It’s a much better use of your time to spend more time on your reusable content, making it as valuable as possible, and then send it out to your social media audience more than once.

Do you have any hesitations to posting old content? Or any lingering questions on how best to do it without annoying your audience? Ask away in the comments!