By Angel Cicerone, Tenant Mentorship
www.tenantmentorship.com

Creating quality social media content takes time and can be overwhelming for a small business owner. Lack of time and creative blocks can discourage you from properly maintaining your all-important digital presence. But there’s a better, easier strategy for content creation called repurposing. Simply put, repurposing content is the creation of multiple posts spun off from a single theme or a single piece of core content.

Effective social media management requires a steady flow of engaging content. By repurposing, you get a lot of bang for your buck by recycling and spinning off pieces of content for various platforms. This strategy:

• saves time
• keeps quality and brand message consistent
• allows you to post on multiple platforms with minimal effort

Repurposing starts with a piece of core content or a theme. You can use a blog post, an original article, a press release or even an article from another source.

Next, take highlights and snippets from the original piece and create multiple types of posts specific to each social media platform: a brief quote for Twitter, a beautiful photo for Instagram, a video for TikTok, etc. You can create three to 10 new pieces of content or more from every core piece by reimagining how you present it.

Boutique Example

Core content: an article or blog post about The 5 Best Ways to Accessorize an Outfit. This can be an original blog or perhaps a great article in a magazine that you can repost.

Spin off content as follows:

• five posts, each focused on one of the five ways to accessorize with photos
• a reel or video that shows the five different ways or five separate videos, each focused on one of the five tips
• poll: What are your favorite accessorizing tricks? You can invite followers to post a photo of their favorite tricks and have followers vote on their favorite. Offer a prize to a winner.
• quick lookbook showcasing the five tips using your own clothing and accessories. Offer it as a free download for those who enter their email addresses.

In this example, you can create as many as 12 different ways to engage your audience from one core piece of content.

Restaurant Example

Core content: video of chef preparing a popular dish

Once you’ve created the video, then you can spin off these types of posts:

• Post the actual recipe for the dish, along with a beauty photo of the dish plated.
• Post photos/videos of customers eating the dish with their reactions or customer reviews of the dish.
• Post static stills from the video in a fast-moving reel or slide show.
• Create a recipe card with photos for free download for those who enter their email addresses.

This type of series can fall within a theme like Chef’s Special of the Month or Fan Favorites, which provides an ongoing framework for your content creation, making the process even easier.

Tips

As you think about reimagining your content, think about:

Turn static into interactive by turning photos into slide shows or animating them in Instagram Stories.

• Turn video into stills.
• Convert an article or blog into a slide show or video.
• Create a poll or survey about the post.
• Add client testimonials or reviews relevant to the content.
• Build a contest around the theme to increase engagement.
• Rework the content for specific platforms like short copy for Twitter, great graphics and hashtags for Instagram, etc.

Once you’ve prepared your package of content, track likes, views and comments to see which types of content fans are engaging with for future post creation.