It might feel like it’s impossible to keep coming up with new ideas of things to write about, make graphics about or film videos about. After all, hasn’t everything already been done before? It sounds you like need to start repurposing.

 

This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James.

 

Anyone these days who advises you to produce new content every single day for your business on social media is probably following a very old piece of advice that they heard many years ago.

 

The reality is that frequency of posting is no guarantee of whether people will see you and want to engage with what you do post. In fact, continuing to post 3 times a day to no audience is madness. Apart from wasting your time, you’re just confirming to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok that you are not even trying to reach people. You’re behaving a little bit like a bot.

 

These days social media is less about going viral and more about:

 

·      Posting things that engage people enough to react to your post

·      Educate people enough to become curious about your business

·      Excite people enough to want to go and find out more about you

 

Unfortunately, we tend to forget all this and try to find an automated, predictable flow of posts that fit into our busy day. Businesses constantly tell me that Facebook is holding them back from being seen. The reality is that they are posting rubbish that no one has an interest in seeing. But let’s not let logic get in the way of a good old whinge, right?

 

At some point in your business’ journey through the world of social media, you may have had one thing that actually worked. Why not repost that? Or give it an update and repost it? Why not go a step further? What was it about that post that got people to respond? Can you replicate that with a new topic or idea? You can search through your page insights to find what is working best, then take what it was that worked and do it again. Likewise, there’s stuff that isn’t working. So it makes sense to stop doing that. Yet most of us just keep repeating the same stuff over and over again. Remember that quote about repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? That definitely applies here.

 

Another kind of repurposing is where you take things you’ve already done and you try to get more out of them. For example, you write regular blog posts. They go on your website and that’s that, right? What if you could take that blog and make it into 30 different other pieces of content?

 

You could repost that blog entry into LinkedIn, Medium, Blogger and even Facebook. That’s 4.

 

Then turn the key points in your blog into graphical quotes on Canva that you can then post on to Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleMyBusiness and Twitter. If you had 3 key points, that’s another 12. Or 16 so far.

 

Now you can use a video template on a tool like InVideo, Canva, Wave Video or Lumen5 to turn each of those points into a musical, moving, animated set of posts.   That’s another 12. We’re already up to 28. Convert each of those into vertically oriented stories to place on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube shorts. That’s another 12. We’re now at 40. 

 

And I haven’t even talked about turning the blog into a podcast episode or a longer-format YouTube video, a live Facebook or Instagram video. You can see how suddenly that boring old blog post can turn into something much bigger, very quickly. What could an extra 43 pieces of content do to lift your presence online?

 

To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.