Hello businesswoman! Let’s talk about simple, strategic ways to repurpose your blog content. Reusing content is a great way to lighten your workload, connect with your audience, and build a clever, confident, and consistent brand voice and message.
As a content creator myself, I know how frustrating it is to put time, energy, and money into writing content, publishing it, and then… what? That’s it!?
Thankfully no, that is NOT it. There are numerous ways you can reuse blog content across the Internet, and social media is one of my favorites.
Today we’re going into detail about how to repurpose your blog posts for social media. If you write long-form emails to your email list, those can be repurposed on social media as well. Both are forms of “content,” and both are assets to your business that you’ll want to make the most of.
But how? The short answer: quote yourself.
How to repurpose content for social media
After spending hours creating long-form content marketing such as a blog article or email update, you want to get the most mileage out of that content across all your digital marketing platforms. One of the best ways to do that is by quoting yourself.
Using quotes in your digital marketing is great because they are short, shareable, and can be repurposed across multiple social media networks. They keep your language and messaging consistent, and besides: you’ve already written them!
Your blog articles and email content are full of short, quotable text that is ripe to be repurposed to boost your brand. Now it’s a matter of putting that text to work for you.
5 ways to repurpose your content with quotes on social media:
1. Create Quote Memes and Images
Using a template or an app like WordSwag, overlay quotable text you wrote onto a graphic or photo and publish it on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Be sure to use relevant hashtags to improve engagement.
Productive tip: For the easiest version, create a square meme, publish it to Instagram, and set up IFTTT or Zapier to automatically post the meme to your other social networks. Be SURE to test the connection to make sure the actual image posts, not just a link to the image on Instagram.
You might be thinking, aren’t you supposed to use different-sized on every social media platform? It depends who you ask. Buffer publishes a fantastic guide (Here’s Your Go-To Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet) to the best sizes for each social media platform, but in my experience, square Instagram images work just fine on other platforms. The best way to determine whether a horizontal image performs better on your Facebook Page is to test it. However, I suggest just going with square images.
It’s important to use a consistent template for these memes. It doesn’t have to be the same background, but be sure to use your brand colors and fonts so that all your quote memes look like they belong to your brand.
2. Highlight “Click-to-Tweet” Opportunities
Similar to the strategy above, consider embedding a “click to tweet” of your quotes in the body of your blog or email (click to tweet!). You can do this just once, or in multiple places if your content is long.
3. Repurpose Quotes into Unique Pins to Promote Your Content
While you’re identifying opportunities to add click-to-tweet, you can use the same quotes to create branded, pinnable images to share on your Pinterest board. After the quote in the body of your blog/email add a link with a CTA to “pin this quote”! (See what I did there?)
Make sure you use horizontally-oriented images for pinnable quotes. Images that are 1200 pixels tall by 800 pixels wide perform best on Pinterest. You’ll need to add the link to your blog post manually if it’s not published yet, or you can wait until your blog publishes to pin the quote.
You can also display these pins at the bottom of your post to encourage readers to Pin them on their Pinterest boards. I got this idea from Being Boss (scroll down to the bottom of this page to see my pinnable quote!).
4. Reuse Quotes in Image Captions and Post Content
Use short, quotable, snippets of your text as post content for images on Facebook, Instagram, emails, and even other blog articles.
There will be plenty of times when you want to share a meme featuring your favorite quote from Maya Angelou or Danielle LaPorte, but say something of your own in the the post itself. Keep a cache of your own content to share with quote memes, articles, videos, or other 3rd party content you publish on your social media and emails.
This is a strategy I’m using with my client Karen Schachter (see below for examples!)
5. Use Quotes as Inspiration
For deeper content for your own blog, email updates or guest posts, use your quotes to inspire new blog articles that go into more depth on the subject of the quote. Feel free to quote yourself in subsequent blog articles and link back to the blog article where the quote comes from!
You can use the same strategy in subsequent email marketing updates. Expand on a quote you wrote in an email, and feel free to use click to tweets, quote memes, and other forms of visual media that support your message.
Finally, consider using your quotes to write for other organizations, publications and blogs. It’s a great way to grow your audience and build inbound links to your website. Go ahead and quote yourself in these guest features. While you always want to pitch original content, there’s no need to completely reinvent the wheel.
Can you think of other ways to repurpose your own quotes across social media and other digital marketing? Let me know on social media! I’d love to hear your ideas.
Examples of repurposing content on social media
I posted this to Instagram in November, and it earned 5th place for most engagement that year (better than 93% of our content). My client Karen wrote the text that accompanies the image in an email to her list in 2014. Here we used Strategy 4 to repurpose it with an image we got from a 3rd party (giving them full credit, of course).
She Negotiates’ blog article The Ten Commandments for Negotiating Women is a perfect candidate for Strategy 1. We created quote memes for each of the 10 commandments, and trickled them out on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Over the past two moths since it was published, the blog post has generated 122% more traffic from LinkedIn and 130% more traffic from Twitter than four other blog posts published during the same time! Any time you write a list, consider creating a quote meme for each item on your list and using them to promote your content.
How to add repurposing blog content to your schedule
Make it part of your routine to pull quotable text from all your long-form content, whether a phrase, a sentence, or a few lines. Create a spreadsheet where you paste this content and note where it was first written, the category it belongs to, and how you plan to reuse it.
Then, designate time in your schedule to make those quote memes, design those pins, schedule those tweets, and plan more long-form content! I recommend setting aside time to “batch” this project so you can create all your repurposed content in one go. Once you have templates for these memes/pins/tweets it’ll be easy to create and schedule them.
To keep track, you’re welcome to use this spreadsheet:
It took 40 minutes to go through strategies 1-3 for this blog post. (I will implement strategies 4 and 5 later.)
It might help to try this with an accountability partner
Reach out to a fellow entrepreneur/friend and arrange a time when you both will review your latest blog article or email, pull out quotes, and create memes, tweets, pins, and more from them. Or you could do it for each other! It might be easier for you to pull content for your friend than for yourself, and vice versa.
Adding this much content creation to your schedule may be overwhelming. Even though you’re repurposing your own content, it still takes time and energy to create the images, schedule the tweets, build the links, and so on.
Frankly, it might not be worth your time to do all the legwork. You have clients to serve and a business to run! If you’re interested in hiring someone to design digital assets for your business based on your best quotes, give me a call.
Reusing your blog content with quotes gives your audience a seamless experience
Finding creative ways to get more mileage out of your long-form content is a brilliant way to create an identifiable brand voice and consistent messaging. A fancy word for this is “integrated marketing,” which means:
“A strategic approach to integrating communications and interactive experiences targeting defined audiences and individuals which coordinates all aspects of marketing of a brand including Paid media… Earned media …and Owned media in order achieve consistent messaging customised where possible by channel which presents a unified and seamless experience to consumers across the customer lifecycle or path to purchase”.
By using short quotes of text from your long-form content across all your marketing platforms, you ensure that your brand voice is consistent. Prospects who interact with you by visiting your blog, reading your emails, or following you on social networks will all receive a similar experience of your brand voice, design, and subject matter.
Now you have many compelling reasons to give this strategy a try! Not only does repurposing your content for social media give you more from your hard work, thus expanding your reach and driving traffic to your website, it also ensures that your prospects are experiencing your brand seamlessly across media. Using your own quotes will help you spread your brand message and connect with your audience in consistent, appealing way.
Care to share?
You have to overcome a lot of inertia to share on social media! I’ve made it easy:
- Facebook: After working on a blog post for hours, the LAST thing you want is to just publish it and move on. Use these 5 strategies to get MORE mileage 🏍 out of long form content. This way your hard work pays off all over the Internet and #socialmedia! http://bit.ly/reuse-blog-content-social-media
- OR share this post!
- Twitter: After spending 🕓 on a blog post, the LAST thing you want is to “just” publish it. Check out these 5 resourceful ways to reuse #blog #content lest it die in Internet anonymity! http://bit.ly/how-to-repurpose-content #contentmarketing #socialmediamarketing #digitalmarketing by @evajannotta
- OR retweet this!
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BgzHP0ZgtJ6/
- Pin this post! 👇
