How To Repurpose Content For Social Media (20 Actionable Tips)

20 Actionable Tips to Repurpose Content for Social Media

Repurposing content statistics show that over 60% of marketers repurpose their content, but only 29% do that strategically.

To get you up to speed, we will start off with the three meta-methods that underpin all types of content repurposing. Knowing these, you'll be able to see what's in action in each specific, actionable tip.

As a result, you will understand the versatility of the meta-methods of repurposing that will persist well after different platforms perish. So let's get started with the meta methods and then go into context-specific repurposing tips.

Change Content Format

This is a meta method for repurposing content. If you have to change the format of the content that you plan to post, you are forced to repurpose instead of recycling. Recycling content entails reposting old content over and over.

This used to be advantageous when Facebook and Instagram had chronological feeds that showed content to users based on the time of upload.

But since that stopped being the case over a decade ago, recycling content can be dangerous to your algorithmic standing. The algorithmic feed shows your content to people who see and engage with it more often.

So if you recycle an earlier video and post it a little later, guess who will see it? People who are logging in late? No. The video will be shown to the same people who saw your last upload. This time, they will not engage with it.

And that will bring down your overall reach. We experienced this first hand. Videos that went viral after first publish were nowhere near after second or third recycling cycle.

Engagement will remain the holy grail of all social media reach, and you cannot afford not to have an element of freshness in everything you post. Fortunately, format changes make your content available to an audience that previously had no clue about its existence.

Change Content Duration

Changing content duration is the strategy for repurposing your content, so it reaches a broader audience. The broader you cast your net, the more varied peoples' attention spans get. By having long-form and short-form content, you can hit all the attention spans.

But how practical is shooting two to three types of content in a single day? When you need to post every day, it is easier to repurpose content by appropriating shorter snippets from a longer video or audio. We will get more specific with this later in the article.

Change Content Dimensions

The third meta-repurposing process entails changing the dimensions of one's content. This was crucial to changing platforms of distribution earlier in social media history. However, now that every platform has different products that span different dimensions, it has become more than crucial to resize content dimensions.

Let's suppose you post long-form videos on youtube. And you don't want to even go near Tiktok. Guess what? Even Youtube is putting Youtube Shorts, which are basically TikTok-like videos, within the Youtube ecosystem. Even if you insist on publishing to a single platform, you must learn to resize your content to fit different dimensions.

Change Content Mood

Changing the mood of your content is a repurposing tactic that helps keep your mostly recycled content fresh across different platforms. It also helps you contextualize your posts, so they fit the mood of the platform you're on. TikTok started off lighter but is still a fun-first platform.

Using music that is whimsical in comparison to the one you use on LinkedIn would make sense. This is a minor tweak that turns recycled content into repurposed content.

Remember to take into consideration the context of the platform where you plan to distribute your content.

Splice Together Multiple Clips to Make Longform Content

When the term "repurposing" is brought up, people often think about making short clips from long videos. It is often true that webinars and zoom meetings get repurposed into smaller clips for general audience consumption.

But you can also compile smaller clips into long-form content. Gary Vaynerchuk has a few episodes that are made out of shorter clips.

Similarly, Ryan Holiday produces podcast episodes that are the audio equivalent of a compilation. The key benefit of compiling clips is that it keeps a short-span audience engaged despite having a long duration.

When someone hops on TikTok and starts browsing content, he might have a short attention span and less patience for a single piece of content. But he may spend hours on the app.

The same effect can be created by compiling different clips so that the focus and the frame of your video are refreshed in under a minute.

Strip Video Audio to Make A Podcast

This is a more technical manifestation of the meta-process of switching formats of your content. By stripping audio and publishing it to platforms that pan audio-only audience tunes into, you reach people who might not have consumed your content.

No matter how popular you are, some people who should know you don't know you. And one reason could be that you're not on the platforms they spend the most time on. Podcasts have become an arm of social media since Google's Alphabet owns a podcasting distribution service.

Transcribe Video or Audio To Make a Blog Post

Blog posts can be linked to social media or even become currency and cash on platforms like Medium, which is the writers' social media. Your video content might have a space on LinkedIn, but people who don't watch videos on the website may read LinkedIn Pulse.

By having the audio of your content transcribed, you can easily turn your content into blog posts that can help you convert your social media followers into website visitors.

TIP: ContentFries is a content repurposing app that can generate accurate transcriptions for more than 120 languages and dialects. On top of that, it has a WordPress integration, so you can easily turn your transcriptions into blog posts.

Add B-roll to Audio To Make a Video

This is yet again an instance of changing the format of your original content. If you are a podcaster who spent years making audio-only content and are just starting out video podcasting, you might think that your video content is thin.

But if you embrace repurposing, your content history becomes available for reposting.

All you need is a relevant B-roll, which you can get for free from websites like Pexels.com. And the audio can be autocaptioned and even edited onto the video with drag and drop software like Content Fries.

If you think you have a valuable audio snippet, don't confine its distribution to an audio-only audience.

Screenshot Tweets To Make Image Posts

This method uses two key repurposing processes. Firstly,it requires a change of format. This might not be evident because we experience tweets the way we experience images.

However, a tweet is a text post that, with a screenshot, becomes a new piece of image content. This image can then be rebranded to fit different contexts.

Here the dimensions of the image also change (another meta-repurposing process). The screenshot is, by default, a 9:16 TikTok dimension image.

It needs to be cropped to a square at a minimum and down to the tweet text at a maximum. The cropped image can be laid over a well-branded background for further context.

Add Captions to Clips To Make Gifs

Tumblr and Twitter are two of the leading social media platforms for gif distribution. But gifs have become more versatile and are available in messaging products of almost every social media app as well as in the comments section of some services.

Videos feature audio, which gifs don't. But if you caption the dialogue from the audio and put it in a video, it can be rendered into a gif.

Remember to keep the gif short and sweet. You can turn a video into a gif by using free video to gif tool.

Download Livestream Content to Splice for Story Posts

Most platforms' live streaming content is shown on the same spot where its story content is stored for 24 hours. When you go live, the people who engage with your stream have an incentive because they can get live responses from you.

However, that doesn't mean each valuable moment requires being present live. If you download your entire live stream, you can cut out valuable portions and post them on your story sections.

It is also possible to splice them together for long-form content, as mentioned earlier. Once you master repurposing content, you will never let your Livestream content go to waste.

Screenshot Text Walls To Make Slide Posts

Who said books are dead? They are just fragmented across social media. People write and read long captions, tweets, and text posts.

But as we move forward in the social media landscape, images are becoming easier to distribute than text. One method of repurposing text post content is to take screenshots and turn them into image slides.

The advantage of an image slide is that you don't overwhelm your audience. Let's suppose the actual text content is 300 words long. There is no way someone scrolling through pictures will pause long enough to read that.

But if the same text is distributed across 10 screenshots, cleaned up and centered, that's 30 words per slide. The same person might not go through the entire thing, but you might get 60 to 90 words across to most people. And some of them might even read the whole thing.

Use Portions of Your Blog Posts for Social Media Captions

If you're a life coach, consultant, or professional speaker, the chances are that your words are valuable. And in word-heavy fields, except for stand-up comedy, most producers maintain blogs.

If you have a blog, you can take the most valuable conclusions, points, and messages in your blog and turn them into social media captions (or text posts).

What do you do if you don't have a blog? Simply transcribe your videos, so they turn into blog posts. Another instance of repurposing (more on this elsewhere in this post).

ContentFries has a handy feature that allows you to export your transcriptions as plain text or publish them on your WordPress blog.

Compile Long Text Posts Into an Ebook

This is a social media marketing tactic that involves repurposing. If you have written articles on LinkedIn Pulse and Facebook Notes, you can convert them into an ebook by merely compiling the content and exporting it to pdf. Who doesn't like free stuff?

Simply positioning your old text posts as a free eBook will not only build goodwill within your online community, but will also ensure that people actually read the content. There are a few social media platforms where you can post PDFs.

One of these is LinkedIn, where you can upload content as a document. Aside from that, the ebook can be traded for email opt-ins or just given out for free.

Turn Ebook Chapters Into Episodic Text Posts or Newsletter

This tactic requires having a book in the first place. But even if you don't have a book, you can take screenshots of highlightable content in others' ebooks and make image posts. You can also copy the text directly to generate text posts.

As long as you give credit where it is due, you can post portions of books across your social media. You can turn your entire ebook into an episodic newsletter or social media text post series. To use others' books, you must play the role of a curator.

That means taking the most important elements, screenshotting them, and cropping the screenshots to highlight them. If you do an episodic series, use different books each time.

Get an Illustrator or Graphic Designer To Visualize Your Point

If you have graphic design skills, then you are fortunate that you can convert a single train of thought into multiple graphics. Or you can simply outsource this process.

Social media has little patience for long walls of text, but if you can get a graphic designer or an illustrator to turn your thought into a more visually engaging piece of media, the repurposed product will have a better chance of going viral.

Comics, images with captions, and quotes with image backgrounds all entice your social media audience. But what can you do if you cannot pay a cartoonist to turn every thought of yours into a cartoon? Don't want to pay graphic designers for each post?

Use ContentFries quote card generator to produce beautifully visualized graphics out of a simple text.

Appropriate Old Content for Before/After Posts

If you're a model, you can use old selfies and place them against new ones to show your progress. The same applies if you're a weightlifter or an athlete. No matter where you are in life, there is something you've made progress with.

And one of the best things about before/after posts is that they feel good no matter how much reach they get. You don't have to be a model to Repurpose old photos or content for contrast in a before/after type content.

Even consultants, coaches, and educators can use old clips. Gary Vaynerchuk does this very beautifully as he throws back to old clips of him making predictions and new clips showing them come true.

Add Hindsight to a Documented Content

Watch 10 minutes of any given reality TV show across any culture and you will find one thing in common. Subjects, themes, and even desired results change but one thing remains common: narration over documented footage.

You can actually reupload old vlogs if your current voiceover narrates what was going on back then. You may even get fancy and record new footage of you in a chair going over what was happening while using old footage as a flashback. Repurposing turns your vlog content into a reality TV show episode. Talk about engagement!

Record Your Spaces/Clubhouse Streams To Use as Podcasts

Another way to repurpose content is to document it while it is being streamed on audio. Most people have wisened up to where they don't let their video streams get wasted as one-offs.

Even people who don't repurpose content upload their live streams as replayable videos. But the problem with audio content is that talk is cheap.

Speakers assume that just because they are in their PJs while on Clubhouse or Twitter spaces, their audio content isn't really valuable. Instagram stories have a highlight feature for a reason. It is meant to save a valuable content shot in a seemingly arbitrary format.

Clubhouse audio or Twitter spaces streams might seem arbitrary. But if you record the audio with a good quality microphone, you can use it to launch a podcast. Podcasts can be used to sell one's own products and services but also to make money from ads.

Add Quotes to Stock Photos or Own Photos

The final key way to repurpose content is to make quote cards. Quote cards can be made with abstract or photo backgrounds. Stock images and one's own photographs can be used in the process. For this, you need to have a quotable saying.

Even if you don't post tweets worth quoting or text posts at all, you can just start recording your shower thoughts. The beauty of content repurposing programs like Content Fries is that you can turn your shower thoughts into quotable power thoughts on social media.