How to Repurpose Content for Social Media

Once you’ve taken the time to create amazing content, it’s only natural that you’d want it to go as far as it possibly can. Repurposing content is the practice of taking old content and turning it into something new that can be used elsewhere.

Repurposing content is a cost-effective way of boosting online presence, amplifying reach, and improving SEO efforts.

There are a variety of ways in which businesses can repurpose their content for social media, keep reading to find out how.

Turn Testimonials into Social Media Content

Customer testimonials are personal stories or quotes from previous customers that demonstrate the effectiveness of a product or service.

They work well as social media content because they’re excellent social proofing tools. They’re from real people—not from personalities who were compensated to say something positive about your brand. Testimonials show potential customers the success stories of previous customers with whom they shared similar needs at some point in time.

Here are the other reasons they work so well as social media content:

• Improve brand recognition: If your content is often what people see when they’re hanging on social media networks, it creates Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA). For example, imagine posting an ad about web forms. Social media users who regularly see the ad are more likely to try that form builder over its competitors when they are in need of an online form.
• Build and develop trust: Sharing testimonials on social media allows your satisfied customers to let others know how satisfactory your product or services are. As a result, potential customers will also feel enticed to try it out for themselves.
• Widen reach: If a customer is featured in a testimonial, chances are, they’ll share it to their own networks too. This will increase your brand’s reach to their networks of friends and family, who are particularly receptive to word-of-mouth marketing from someone they trust.
• Boost engagement and sales: Walk in the shoes of your potential customer and say you’re searching for the services you offer. It’s far easier to choose a brand or service that has testimonials and reviews from those with the same pain points you have. It’s the better choice—a safe and practical option rather than contacting random professionals or those without testimonials for their services.

You can also use customer testimonials to outperform your competitors. If your previous customers love your product, displaying their love for it will encourage others to try your product—instead of your competitor’s.

To turn testimonials into social media content, here’s what you can do:

• Share customer photos: It’s always a good idea to attach human faces to your testimonials if possible. Social proof is only effective when it’s believable, and attaching a face to a name makes it more real.
• Create social graphics: In case there are no customer photos that you can use, beautify text-based reviews. Use them to create social graphics with graphic design tools like Snappa, Stencil, Colorcinch, and Canva.
• Create testimonial infographics: If you have glowing reviews and testimonials, show them off in an easy-to-consume infographic. Beautifying and placing them all in one place can help you target specific customer pain points that your product or service solves.
• Use social ads: Paying for social ads can be cost-effective if you prioritize content that already has performed well. You’ll be able to amplify its performance with targeting.

Transform Webinars into Video Tutorials

Webinars contain an immense amount of information. Along with other visual content, video has taken the world by storm, especially on social media. Due to the eye-catching nature of images, infographics, and video content, users find them more engaging and easier to digest than text-based alternatives.

Adding video content to your social media strategy is a great way to engage your followers with dynamic content. Other than their attention-grabbing capability, videos work so well for these reasons:

• Drive conversions: Videos afford a three-dimensional look into otherwise two-dimensional products. They’re an engaging, consumable way for your customers to get more information about your brand quickly, a critical aspect of the decision-making phase.
• Add personality: Videos are excellent tools for showing transparency and humanity. You can do a “behind the scenes” compilation to demonstrate your core principles and put human faces behind your brand.
• Search optimization: Social media platforms are increasingly becoming similar to search engines. It’s an advantage that you can create powerful headlines, use keyword-rich descriptions, and engage in other practices to optimize your videos for relevancy.

Here’s the problem: most people think of webinars as one-off events—and nothing more. The solution? Repurpose them and turn them into highly watchable video tutorials.

An excellent approach is to transcribe these video tutorials to-be. This way, they’re accessible to people with hearing impairments and those who prefer text-based content. Doing so also boosts their value— it makes them easily searchable and scannable.

To turn webinars into video tutorials, here’s what you can do:

• Create FAQs videos: Your webinar’s Q&A portion is useful in answering people’s questions about your product or service or any actionable tips you’ve provided. At the end of the videos, you may also include a link to a medium where people can raise the concerns not tackled in the webinars.
• Edit into how-to videos: Focus on the portions with thorough explanations. Turn them into short and shareable clips that can walk people through the process of using your product or service.
• Make highlight reels: People may appreciate lengthy and in-depth webinars. Sometimes, though, they don’t have enough time to watch the entire video. By summarizing webinars into digestible chunks in the form of highlight reels, it allows viewers to get the main points without investing too much time.

Offer as on-demand videos – Remove dead space, small talks, and irrelevant elements—basically, clean them up as you see fit. This is especially useful if your webinar topics will stay relevant for years to come.

Turn Blog Posts into Social Content

Turning blog posts into social media content is an excellent way to create a bond between your website and social platforms. While this is not essential, it helps create a strong brand voice and build brand awareness.

More importantly, it sends social traffic to your blog. It gives your marketing a better touch—more cohesive with a consistent voice.

To turn blog posts into social media content, here are the best practices you can try:

• Use one-liner quotes: People enjoy reading quotes and other bite-sized chunks. Use them, add images, and you have a beautiful and distributable graphic.
• Place shareable buttons like “Click to Tweet” and “Pin It.” These buttons do all the work for you if you use them and share the result. They also help people who read your blog easily share it with their network.
• Create infographics: Infographics are informative, easily readable, and shareable—exactly how social media users want their information to be served to them. (Pro tip: your infographic can be split up into mini blocks to share bits of information and data at a time!)
• Share snippets on LinkedIn: Especially if you have tons of long-form blog posts and your target audience is more on the professional side, LinkedIn is the platform for you. We find that statistics and thought leadership tend to work best on LinkedIn.

You can turn all your blog posts into social media content. If you have thousands of posts, though, it’s about priorities.

Here are tips that can help you choose the blog posts to turn into social content:

• Use high performers: Determine which posts were well-received by your target audience. If you use them again on social media, you may have similar results.
• Identify poor performers: Redeem the posts that didn’t perform as well. Maybe social media users will enjoy them.
• Focus on your audience: Find out what kind of content they like or if they need particular information. Then, use that information or select the most relevant blog post to give them what they want.
• Be relevant and timely: Provide appropriate content to your audience. For example, holiday content doesn’t make much sense in June. Be sure to be timely with your content, especially when jumping on trends.

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Understanding your audience is key to effectively repurposing content for social media. Most people want digestible and shareable content, so creating it that way will attract them.

Make good use of testimonials, webinars, and blog posts – you can get so much more out of your content by repurposing these pieces.

Use social calendars, social listening, and other social media marketing tools to help you stay on schedule and streamline your social media strategy.

About the Author:

Rebecca DiCioccio is the Marketing Manager at Paperform. Outside of work, Rebecca can be found exploring the outdoors or with a book in hand. Rebecca’s background in copywriting and a keen interest in SEO and digital marketing means she understands the importance of staying up to date with the latest trends in a dynamic and ever-changing industry.