Repurpose Social Media Content

So you’ve heard that content is king huh?

And you want to start publishing content so your business can be found online without you having to continue to build your marketing funnel.

But how can you publish so much content if you don’t have that many resources yet?

For example, if you are a restaurant but don’t have the budget for photoshoots or media people, how can you still make people salivate with the content that you publish?

Today I am going to show you how to do that.

Your Content Goals

The first thing you want to think of before you start publishing content is what is your goal for all of your content.

If your purpose is general – meaning you just want to reach as many people as possible and get them to look at any content so they are aware that you are in business, then that is okay. However I must warn you that that purpose is going to be hard to validate the time you spent on it.

If your purpose is something more specific, such as getting more applications, getting more leads or getting more sales, then you can translate those purposes into revenue-driving actions. You can put a number on these actions and deem them to be worthy of your time.

When you know your purpose, you will probably get a better idea of what kind of content you want to post.

Here’s an example: if you know that you want more sales and you know that showing off your best sellers will help you get more sales, 

Find Sources

After you know what goal you want to fulfill for your business, you want to start sourcing content that fits that goal.

Here are some criteria you should think of when you are trying to source content online:

1. Must be photos of my exact products and services
2. Must be unique to my business

And where else can you find content that meet these criteria none other than social media?

On social media, people are posting about businesses everyday. They post about what products they use from businesses and what experiences or services they take part in from businesses.

Did you know that they probably post content about your business too?

The best examples are when they post reviews about your business or when they post a photo or video about your business.

You can find reviews about your business on popular review platforms such as Google Yelp and Tripadvisor.

You can find photos that people post about your business on popular platforms such as Google Yelp, Tripadvisor, Instagram and Facebook.

We will work with these two types of content for repurposing into our own content.

Source Reviews

When it comes to sourcing reviews, the biggest amount of work is organizing them in your own way so you can easily look up when you can repurpose them.

Usually you want to think of:

1. Is the review maximum rating?
2. Did they mention any specific products or services?
3. Did they come for a special occasion or experience?

Once you know which reviews refer to these things, then you can organize them and search for them easily.

Let’s get started on sourcing with Yelp.

Go to your Yelp page. Once you are there, scroll down until you see your reviews. Once you are there, you probably only want to repurpose the good reviews into content. You can still use the bad reviews for good feedback about customers and to monitor customer complaints.

Once you are at the reviews section, you can sort the reviews by highest rating:

After that, you can review search within the reviews in case you are trying to find specific products or services that people give 5 star ratings on. Here you can see that I searched for reviews mentioning birthdays:

Then I can use these reviews along with my content that I want to promote birthday parties at the restaurant.

Now it is time to organize the review into a safe place where I can look it up whenever I would like to. I will do this in Google Sheets. Here is a link to my spreadsheet template where you can organize the reviews that you find: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/138o5z1JHfGHdqsZb3r7ApHAQR84czo4_BLJ8_ZkAxWI/edit?usp=sharing

I will show you how to use it right now.

When you find a review that you will like to use, you want to make sure you have the right information recorded so you don’t have to go through this sourcing process again.

You want all the information recorded in this spreadsheet for easy access at any time.

So when you find the review that you think you will use, record all the pieces of information into the Google Sheet:

You can keep doing this until you have a bunch of reviews recorded and ready to repurpose.

Source & Download Photos & Videos

Before you go and look for photos and videos, you first need to know how to download the photos and videos first. You can read my tutorial on how to safely download photos and videos.

So we just sourced some text that we can use in our captions and to put into graphic designs. But these captions and graphics designs also need photos to complement them.

So next I am going to show you where you can find photos and videos that are relevant and useful for your business.

We found some reviews on Yelp before and Yelp is also a great place to find photos and videos. If your Yelp page is popular enough, you will find a bunch of photos and videos in the Yelp photos section. You can view all the photos and videos of your business on your Yelp page here:

When you are viewing your photos, you can even sort by any categories that they have filtered for you. You can also search for specific photos just like when you searched for reviews:

When it comes to choosing photos, you want to make sure that your photos fit these criteria. Potential to be:

1. Sharp
2. Bright
3. Contrasting
4. Easy to caption

Don’t worry if you can’t really spot out the photos that fit these criteria. I will help you train your eye so that you can look for these things and your repurposed content can attract a lot of attention.

Once you have chosen a photo that fits these criteria, now it is time to organize it in a spreadsheet just like you did with the reviews. I have set up a matured spreadsheet template for you here that I have used over the last 7 years to organize my sourced content:

When you get into the spreadsheet, you will see that there are two tabs. The tab that you start on gives you specific instructions on how to use the spreadsheet. It also gives you instructions on what to fill in so that you have easily go back to your content sources and update the spreadsheet if needed.

The second tab is where we will record all of our content.

In this tab, I have organized all the information you need as header rows so you can easily refer back to your sources and also repurpose your content in an organized way. You will see why we need all this information because it will really help you save time in the long run.

Click on the link above to go to the spreadsheet. Once you do, go ahead and create a duplicate of the file for your own use by going to File > Make A Copy.

Once you have your own copy, you can start recording photo and video content that you find and your spreadsheet should end up looking something like this:

Where all the information on every piece of content is filled out.

Once you have done this for Yelp, you can also source photos from Facebook or source photos from Instagram to add to the spreadsheet.

When you have gone through all 3 networks to the best of your ability and available time for now (you can always update later), then you know you have the most amount of content you can work with for now.

The very last place you might be able to source content is through stock photo sites. Some of these sites may have stock photos of products and services that look just like yours. Check out this awesome wagyu video I found on Envato.

Edit Photos & Videos

The next step in repurposing your content is to edit the content you already found. The content you already found is already very high quality, but you don’t really know if it is being used to its highest potential until you start editing.

Don’t be intimidated when I say edit. Sometimes when I mentioned photo editing, people think that it requires some unthinkable skill that costs thousands of dollars to outsource or even learn.

However today I am going to teach you how to edit your content in a very simple way. I will even show you how I do my editing in bulk so you can apply specific automatic actions and get hundreds of repurposed content ready to go in less than 30 minutes.

Click on the above link to see how I edit my photos to become crisp and clean!

One thing that you want to be aware of here is that I don’t include how to resize for different social media platforms. If you want me to cover this, go ahead and request it in the comments below.

Write Captions

I wrote a totally different post to walk you through how I write captions that increase engagement by up to 300%. 

Check it out then you can come back here to continue your journey to publishing your first repurposed content.

Schedule Posts

Now that you have a bunch of photos edited and captions, its time to schedule them on your social media platforms!

There are different ways to schedule posts such as:

1. Fully automated on a schedule that is chosen for you
2. Schedule chosen by you and you can schedule in bulk
3. Schedule chosen by you and you can schedule one by one

If you want a schedule that is chosen for you based off of your optimal posting times, then you can have my team do it for you here:

If you want a schedule chosen by you, then you probably need some kind of social media scheduling software.

These are my top social media scheduling softwares that I use and approve of. I usually only recommend software that I find intuitive and inexpensive. You may or may not have heard of some of these, but trust me on these recommendations because I have tested them rigorously over months of months of use and have found the below recommendations to be the best.

Jarvee

Smarterqueue

Measure Results

If you aren’t measuring the results of your posts, then you probably can’t validate the amount of time you spend on publishing content.

There must be some kind of objective behind your content repurposing and publishing. With that objective, you can really know if content marketing is a profitable avenue to your business goals.

Even if you just want brand awareness, it would be good to know how much brand awareness you need to reach your revenue goal.

You can always measure your results in the social platforms themselves. For example, Facebook has a tool called Facebook Insights where you can review the performance of your posts.

However you don’t have much room to play around with the numbers such as comparing each post performance to your benchmarks, expectancies and all time highs.

If you want a tool that can help you do that, I highly recommend Supermetrics.

Supermetrics is a tool that connects to Google Sheets. It pulls data from various sources including Facebook, Instagram, Google and more.

Then it can compare all of your statistics based on how you organize it.

When you have Supermetrics, you will be able to create comparison spreadsheets like this:

I set some conditional formatting to tell me which of the posts had all time highs. All the numbers in green are all time highs. We hit them recently!

I’ll write up a separate post on how to use the above report on Supermetrics and what else you can use Supermetrics for.

The point of the reporting is to know how different posts performed. Then, you can know if you want to re-use the post. It’s really efficient practice to recycle posts that performed well before. It’s also really good testing practice to recycle poor-perfoming posts but post them at the different day or time than the original post.

That way you have multiple testing instances of bad performance and you can oust that piece of content forever!

Recycle

The last thing you want to do to create a good cycle of content longevity is to recycle your content.

Recycling content is very similar to repurposing content, except you don’t have to go through the repurposing motions anymore. Recycling means that you re-use the content, but make small changes based on the metrics that you have.

For example, if you expected a specific post to get a lot of comments but it didn’t, then you can add a Call To Action in your caption to provoke a comment. Usually, questions are the best way to provoke comments.

When you recycle content, you also choose different days and times to publish the recycled content. For example, if you published a piece of content on a weekday evening, the next time you can try it on a weekday morning or weekend evening to see what the results will be.

Because a post has a specific amount of life, it will only reach a specific demographic according to the demographics schedule. For example, if you post in the weekday evening, you will probably get people who usually check their social media accounts in the weekday evening including people who often check their social media on their commute back from work.

In Conclusion

This is my full guide for how to repurpose content. It works really well if you don’t have the resources to create your own content and is best suited for beginner content marketing people.

In the end, you should end up with a content library large enough to fit for a year.

How much content has this guide helped you produce?

Comment below and let other people know what you found along the way of using this process too!