You have heard the phrase, “reduce, reuse and recycle” for paper and plastic products…but did you know, you can also use this phrase for social media?
Recycling social media is the process of taking past posts and transforming them into new posts. Reusing social media posts can save you time when you are in a crunch or give you a burst of inspiration when you are having a MAJOR creative brain freeze. No need to panic, just think what has done well in the past and how can you recycle it into something new!
Here are some tips to help with your recycling process:
1) Do your Research!
If you have a social media system like Hootsuite or SproutSocial, you can easily download reports from the past few months or years to see what posts have performed well with your fans. Pull one of your reports and take notice of your engagement. Once you determine which ones did well, think about what themes each post had, what photos were used, what words you used and if you used any hashtags.
2) Switch up images and keep the copy.
Keep it simple and reuse past copy, but change the image. For example, if you had a post with a quote about reaching for your goals paired with a mountain image, reuse the quote and pair it with another empowering image.
3) Go EVERGREEN.
Evergreen posts are social media posts that can be posted multiple times in one day and can never go out of style. No matter how many times you post this type of content your followers will interact with it. For example, if you own a coffee shop, posting a coffee image with the phrase “I like this a latte” should generate interaction every time if your followers love coffee as much as your business does.
4) Everyone loves a good throwback post.
Take a past post and use it word for word as a #throwback post. You can either name these as throwback posts or even #reposts from other pages that have relevant content you can share on your social pages.
5) Incorporate quotes from blog posts into social posts.
#DOUBLEreuse alert! Use your own content to your advantage. You can get your own quotes from content you have already created on a company blog or even take quotes from fans who gave your business a positive review.
6) Clean up long posts and repost as short posts.
Did you write a long-winded post with a ton of good information? Take chunks of the content and use it in a shorter post. Then, you can get multiple posts out of one post you have already created!
