Recycling Older Blog Content for Social Media
Blogging is a laborious but rewarding effort. Pouring one’s heart, soul, time, talent, research, and keystrokes into a finished piece of prose is one part of the blogging equation. Recycling older blog content for social media usage is the very pivotal other half of the equation.
One and done is not the way to view social media or blog posts. We’ve blogged 25 ways to promote a blog post after publishing, and now here are some tips for repurposing blog posts long after you hit publish:
1 Pictures say a thousand words, and if you are a blogger who works with brands: Pictures can make or break a post. BlogPaws’ Director of Community Education, Aimee Beltran, shares this hot tip: She simply updated an older blog post that barely reached 100 views and was able to garner thousands of visitors to that blog post. How did she do it? She embedded the post with this image, re-promoted it, SEO optimized it, and watched the traffic roll in as one of her most popular posts to date:
Note the clear image, call out, vertical landscape, unobtrusive watermark, and this is what took her post to a whole new level of traffic. Follow the Irresistible Icing Pinterest board here.
2 Create a Category Pin: Manually upload an image to Pinterest and then link to any URL to a blog post. For example, say you blog a lot about litter boxes and cats. Search your blog for “cat litter box.” The URL for the results becomes the URL for the pin!
You create a new pin for something like “Everything You Need to Know About Cats and Litter Boxes,” you manually upload it to your Pinterest account, and when followers click on the image on Pinterest, they land on your category search. Wha-la!
3 One Pin = Five Days’ Worth of Content. Example: Monday is the day my post on How to Potty Train a Dog goes live. I pin it to my puppy training board and my blog board on Pinterest. Tuesday I pin it to my dog health board (since it involves keeping a dog healthy). Wednesday it goes up to my Favorite Dog Products board since it contains some product recommendations. Thursday it is pinned to a group board of which I am a member. See how it works? Repurpose and then in say a month or so, do it again!
Become besties with something like Canva or PicMonkey and add images to your Tweets associated with the blog post. The images should be Twitter ready, and the beauty of Canva is this: The templates for each social media platform are there! PicMonkey and Canva both have mobile-ready apps and free versions.
Segment your post into tweetable nuggets. I pull at least 3 to 5 tweets out of every post I do and house them in Trello. Lead folks back to your blog post with the shortened URL. This is what Senior Editor, Maggie Marton, and I dub a “hactic:” A combo of a hack and a tactic. You can read here about hot social media tips and hactics
Re-promote older blog posts (and older is something you’ve already published) with different hashtags. Who are you trying to reach with your blog posts? Who is the target audience? Answer these questions and then hashtag your tweets appropriately without going overboard.
Make a short video to accompany a blog post and post it to Instagram. For example, when I want to showcase a blog post about how easy it is to brush my dog’s teeth, I show the dog having his teeth brushed. We make it fun, memorable, and embeddable. In a future post I do about dog dental health, I can embed the video I shared on Instagram. Imagine that: I share a video and link to an old post…and then a future post includes the embedded Instagram video! #WinWin
Change the URL in your profile on Instagram to reflect a blog post. Include a fabulous, clean, clear image that makes your followers want to learn more.
This is What Makes a Photo Pop on Instagram.
Bonus: 10 Photo Apps for Better Social Media Images
Hashtag Usage: Breathe new life into older posts that include an array of hashtags for audiences who might have missed your perfect prose.
Live Video: These two words say it all: Facebook seems to be favoring video at the present time. Take an older blog post and invite your followers in through a live video. The beauty of live is that is stored in your Facebook account. While cross country heading to the BlogPaws Conference, I live Facebooked “5 travel tips for pets” and it received a lot of initial feedback…but even more views and shares long after I completed the video.
Look at comments on your previous posts. Reader comments make for some of the best Facebook fodder. Example: “Does your gerbil keep you up at night? Here’s how to keep him happy while you catch some zzzz’s.” Perhaps a reader addressed this in the comments section of a post on gerbil care. Update your post, include a snazzy image, and wha-la: Instant CPR for an older post.
Finding new ways to recycle your existing content is a time-saving strategy that successful bloggers and influencer frequently use.
What’s your best tip on recycling older content for social media?
Carol Bryant is the Marketing and Social Media Manager for BlogPaws and runs her own blog, Fidose of Reality and its fundraising arm, Wigglebutt Warriors. When not busy playing with her Cocker Spaniel, Dexter, she stays far away from cooking. Her trademark is her mantra and is tattooed on her arm: My Heart Beats Dog.®
