Social Media Content Ideas and Examples for Brands

May marketers feel overwhelmed with work and feel like they can’t come up with new, original ideas.

content repurposing can help take some of the burden off of your shoulders by continuing to produce high quality content on a regular schedule. Given the challenges you face, repurposing content can be a valuable tool.

Content repurposing is not a way to cheat the system. You’re taking your existing, high-quality content and presenting it in a different form on new channels. This can bring many benefits to your business. There are specific strategies to repurpose content you’ve already created. You can also create new content with future repurposing in mind.

Repurposing content may feel like you’re recycling old material to your audience, but that’s not the case. You can repurpose old content and give it new life while still providing value to your audience.

Why should I repurpose content?

If you want to save yourself some time, you can repurpose old content, or create new content specifically for repurposing. This way, you can reuse high-performing pieces of content, or create a blog post that can also be used as a podcast episode, quote, or part of an Ebook.

If you create several pieces of content that are all related to the same topic, you may see an increase in your website’s search engine ranking. This is because search engines will see your site as an authoritative source on that topic. Creating content is not only beneficial for your users, but can also help improve your website’s search engine ranking.

Additionally, reusing content helps you expand, in terms of the amount of content and the audience you reach. Creating a blog post gives you a presence, but if you create a blog post that can also be turned into an email newsletter or a how-to YouTube video, you now have three different types of content and a presence on three separate platforms with three separate and diverse audience groups.

All of HubSpot Academy’s content is free, and the repurposing mini-course discusses the benefits of content repurposing in more depth.

There are many advantages to repurposing your content, so let’s explore some of the different ways you can do it.

How to Repurpose Content

This means that you can take a blog post that performed well and turn it into a video, or take a popular social media post and turn it into an infographic. You can even take a guest blog post and turn it into a podcast episode. If you want to repurpose content for different channels, start by looking at metrics to see what has performed well.79 brainstorm ways to continue to provide value to your different target audiences with the same content in different forms. This could mean taking a blog post that performed well and turning it into a video, or taking a popular social media post and turning it into an infographic. You can even take a guest blog post and turn it into a podcast episode.

There are always ways that you can repurpose your content. Even if you feel like there is no possible way to do so, there is probably a solution. Let’s go over some options below.

How To Repurpose Blog Content

You can use a tool like Word2vec to turn your blog posts into different vector representations. This will allow you to semantically search through your blog posts, which can be incredibly useful for finding related content. If you have a blog, you probably have a lot of well-written blog posts. You might think there’s no way to convert these text-heavy pieces into other formats, but there are actually several ways to do so. One option is to use a tool like Word2vec to turn your blog posts into vector representations. This would let you semantically search through your blog posts, which could be really useful for finding related content.

1. Create a YouTube video.

How-to style posts are excellent content to convert into visual guides on YouTube, especially ones that are heavy on graphics. For example, if you’re a business that coaches salespeople on mastering a sales call, you could write a script to include in a blog post. But that same script could also be turned into a YouTube video, with an actual salesperson running through it.

2. Create a SlideShare.

One easy way to repurpose your blog content is to convert it into a presentation using SlideShare. This can be a high-performing piece of content that you reproduce into a SlideShare. SlideShares are shareable and introduce your words to an audience in a different way. Plus, presentations allow you to use other graphic elements that might not be present in a blog post.

Copyblogger increased the traffic to one of their blog posts by adding an image.

3. Create an infographic.

If your blog post is full of statistics or data, an infographic might be a good way to present it.

If you want to engage your consumers and give your content more meaning, try creating a summary of the most important statistics from your posts in the form of an infographic. You can post these infographics on your blog or social media.

4. Create an ebook.

If you want to offer your audience more in-depth information about a certain topic, creating an ebook is a great option. You can touch on specific key elements in your blog post and then offer the ebook as a more thorough discussion of the content. Search Engine Journal did this with their blog posts about Content Marketing. They have ten articles that are free to access, but they also offer a more detailed ebook guide.

5. Extract thought leadership quotes.

If you frequently recruit industry leaders or specialists to contribute to your content, you do so because you are aware they have useful perspectives (which your audience will also think). Pull out noteworthy quotes from articles and post them on social media, make infographics, or use them as excerpts in email newsletters. For example, here is one from the HubSpot Academy Instagram account.

6. Create a podcast episode.

Consider creating podcasts from high-performing blog posts. You can use the copy as a script, invite thought leaders back for more in-depth discussions of the insight they’ve given for the posts, or simply discuss the blog post in its original form.

There are several ways that you can take your text based blog posts and give them new life. This can be done by exposing their content to different audiences. We will go into more detail about this below.

Repurposing Content for Social Media

The six types of content you can use on social media are: 1. Photos 2. Graphics 3. Videos 4. Testimonials 5. Blog Posts 6. Podcasts

1. Use old images as post backgrounds.

You can use your high-quality visuals more than once by using them as post backgrounds. As long as you follow the Instagram size requirements, you can use these images as the background for quotes you extract from blog posts or simply post the images on their own. This will help draw audience attention to a past project.

2. Post snippets of existing video content.

You can increase your business’s visibility by posting short clips of your YouTube videos on social media platforms.

Most social media platforms allow you to post video content, so if you edit it down to fit within their video-length requirements, you can easily repurpose a video for each of the platforms you have a presence on. If you’re hesitant to go this route, or new to video overall, consider the following stats from Wyzol: 86% of video marketers say that video has a high return on investment (ROI), and 85% of businesses already use video as a marketing tool.

3. Post user-generated content.

User-generated content can be anything from reviews on your product pages to one-off tweets from a satisfied customer. These can be repurposed for social media, providing value in channels other than their original one. Here’s an example from beauty brand Black Girl Sunscreen where they’ve used customer reviews in an Instagram video for a new product launch.

4. Repost social media content from your other profiles.

Although it may appear to be a complicated process, you can post content from your social media profiles onto your other social media profiles.

The text is discussing how someone could share content from one social media platform to another. For example, taking a screenshot of a Facebook post to share on LinkedIn.

5. Create new infographics.

If you have data from surveys or other research, creating an infographic is a great way to repurpose that content. Infographics are especially effective at conveying data in a visually appealing way.

Your audience is more likely to remember what you say if you include data visualizations because they provide a picture of the significance of the information. Images are 65% more memorable after a period of three days.

This is an infographic from HubSpot’s Instagram account that shows some data about the company.

6. Extract quotes from existing content.

Earlier, I mentioned that extracting quotes from high-quality content, especially when it includes insights from industry experts, can be very effective on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. So take these quotes, create social media posts with them, and share them on all your favorite social channels.

How To Repurpose Webinars and Videos

Webinars and videos are great ways to connect with your target audience, but not everyone can access them. Thankfully, there are ways to repurpose them so everyone can benefit from your content. Below, we’ll go over how to repurpose video content so everyone in your audience can access and benefit from it.

1. Create text transcripts of your videos.

One way to make sure your videos and webinars are accessible to everyone is to create transcripts. This gives people who use Assistive Technology another way to enjoy your content.

2. Turn video transcripts into blog posts.

If you create transcripts of your videos, you can also turn them into blog posts. This is especially convenient if your videos have a logical structure, as the transcript will likely not need much editing before it can be repurposed as a blog post. For example, the SEO tool Moz produces a weekly video series called Whiteboard Friday. Each video is its own piece of content, but they also use a transcription tool to turn the videos into blog posts.

3. Create a podcast episode.

Use your preferred tool to clean up the audio from webinars and videos, then post it on a podcasting platform.

Final Considerations

Not all blog content is useful for repurposing.

If you’re just repurposing content for the sake of it, you might not be as effective as you could be. So it’s important to think about the different ways you can turn your blog content into other formats.

Assuming that all blog content can be turned into video content is not always accurate. It depends on the goal or strategy in mind. After that, content creators can pick out which blog content would be useful for their particular needs.

The most effective way to use old blog content is to make sure it is still useful and appropriate when you change its format.

Even though it may not be original, using old blog content can be useful for content creators. This is because well-liked material is likely to generate interest from both new and existing audiences.

However, if content creators don’t have a clear strategy, repurposing blog content may not be effective.

In general, content creators must keep the following points in mind:

• What is the main objective of repurposing blog content?
• Does the repurposed blog content continue to offer value?
• Does repurposing blog content contribute to an overarching strategy?
• Is repurposed blog content the most effective strategy?
• Would it be more useful to create brand-new content?