How many times do you feel like you need to be writing more blog posts and social media posts? The guilt kicks in, you start to wonder how you can manage social media marketing AND run your business….and then the stress takes over…nothing happens. (I seriously think I need to start an abandoned social media marketing shelter for neglected blogs and social media accounts!)
Never fear, there is a simple content creation solution. Instead of trying to come up with new concepts, go through your old blog posts, social media posts, or graphics, and repurpose them! Yes, it’s that simple!
Use Old Content to Make New Content!
Search and Share – In order to keep disseminating good content, recycling material is key! Why waste great efforts? Find some oldies, but goodies, by going to your blog and looking through your archives. Or, if you have a topic in mind, search key terms through your blog’s search bar (if your blog doesn’t have a search bar, stop now and call or email your web person to add one!). Posting old blog posts or videos and sharing them is one of the easiest ways to keep your social media accounts filled with good content. And don’t overthink the text in the post! I often use the title of the blog post for Twitter and for Facebook, G+, Linkedin, I use a great sentence from the post to introduce the URL. And don’t forget to shorten your URL links by using free websites such as Bitly.com to save space!
Use your share buttons – This is one of my favorite go-tos and one of the easiest ways to share. Go to the post you want to share and put those share buttons to use (if you don’t have share buttons on each blog post, get your web designer to put them in!). This is one of the easiest ways to re-share old posts from your website. I use this all the time for Twitter and Facebook especially. More about how to do this and best practices here.
Set it and forget it – It can be hard to remember to post every day. But luckily you don’t have to! There are all kinds of social media scheduling services to make your social media marketing easier! Hootsuite and other social scheduling tools are your friend. There are many tools out there to help you push your marketing to the next level! Go out and use them! If I post to a client’s social media, I often take that post and schedule it to post 3-4 months later so the time I take writing the content gets double mileage!
Use small posts to make bigger ones – Lately I have been taking old images (mostly quotes) and putting them into blogs and writing more about what the quote means, both to the client and customer. We also take tweets and expand the idea into a blog post. Often the “what do I write about?” is the biggest hurdle to writing, this gets you over that hump.
The biggest barrier to great content marketing creation is overthinking it. You simply need to post quality content that has value to your audience on a frequent basis. Use these tips and you might feel like you are cheating…which is OK! It’s not and your audience is not focused on “ooh, that only took them a few minutes to post!” They are focused on you being there and sharing and caring!
Happy content marketing!
