In the recent years, reaching out to your potential consumers has become a lot easier owing to the rapid growth of social media. Whether small or large, every business can leverage the power of social media to grow their market. However, social media isn’t all roses. To stand out from your competition, you have to create fresh and unique content regularly, which to be honest, isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

That’s where content recycling comes into play. Why spend your time and marketing budget finding new topics and creating new content when you can use what worked wonders in the past. Repurposing content isn’t a shortcut, consider it one of the guerilla marketing tactics that will help you create a lot of buzz in a relatively short time and with minimal efforts. But most importantly, it will save your brand from the damage caused by unoriginal and run-of-the-mill content.

Here is how you can recycle your best social media content for more engagement. 

Repurpose the Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is perfect for repurposing and reposting. Simply put, evergreen content is the content that never goes out of fashion. People will always consume this content whether it was composed a decade or a year ago. Besides, your new consumers are less likely to have viewed your old content. So, when you repost this content many people will regard it as fresh content anyway.

To find the evergreen content, you must first dig a little deeper into your archives to determine what is evergreen. Once you have made a list of the evergreen content, find out what are the most trending topics today. Although evergreen, randomly published content usually generates less engagement. So, repost only trending content. There are a variety of tools available to manage evergreen content.

However, you shouldn’t rely too much on the evergreen content. Posting evergreen content too frequently means making people see the same content again and again. To prevent this from happening, try to create a schedule to report different types of evergreen content and stick to it. 

Create the Follow Up Content

Many successful movies such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Ice Age have created sequels to extend the original concept further, and they have done surprisingly well. In a similar vein, you can also create a follow-up or part two of your most successful content. For example, if you had done a feature on an industry expert or a client, maybe you can create a part two about how they are doing today.

You can do the same thing with ebooks. You can produce second or even third part of an ebook series. For example, if your first ebooks was about Facebook marketing basics, you can compose the part two about how the new newsfeed update affects Facebook marketing. Make sure to use the original title of the article + part 2. In this case, it will go something like, “The Basics of Facebook Marketing, Part 2: What Happens after the Newsfeed Update.” 

Create a Throwback Thursday

Another great way to repurpose your old social media content is to create a throwback day. You can have a Throwback Thursday–or even a Monday, whatever you like. This trick is especially useful for visual social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest where the content is usually an image or video. In this process, you are essentially capitalizing on the nostalgia factor, which alone is enough to generate substantial engagement.

However, make sure the content you intend to republish is at least a couple of years old (a true throwback), relevant, nostalgic, catchy, and shareable. If it doesn’t resonate with your audience, it will have little appeal. You can pick something up from an old campaign or a particular event. For example, you can share the photos of an office picnic, or a charity event, or an award you won. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #tbt or #throwbackthursday

Repost the Content across New Social Media Platforms

Chances are you also have official accounts of different social media platforms just like most organizations. It provides you with the opportunity to share the old content on the new channels. For example, you can share a post that became viral on Facebook a while ago on Instagram. However, you need to find content that may work in a new context.

If you have text content such as a blog post, you can turn it into a visual form such as an infographic and share it on new social media platforms. Infographics can be used to break down a data-intensive blog post into a visually appealing content format. According to a Venngage survey, nearly 42% of marketers reported that infographics and other original graphics were the more engaging than any other form of visual content.

You can publish infographics on your website, guest blogging platforms, Facebook, Pinterest, and even Instagram. Alternatively, you can also convert a tweet into a visual quote and publish it on Instagram. In short, there are many ways to represent the same content in a new context.

Over to You

Successful social media marketing requires posting fresh and unique content regularly. Content recycling allows you to satisfy this demand in a relatively less time and effort. Hopefully, these four tips will prove helpful in this regard. Are there any other ways to recycle your marketing content? Share your ideas in the comments below.