Give Your Old Content a Refresh

We all know that creating content can be exhausting; sometimes, it drains you of all your ideas. The craziest part of it all is that most people do not know how to refresh or repurpose old content. It’s okay – we are going to walk you through it. Refreshing old content can help you when you are in a time crunch, stuck in a rut, looking to fill some gaps, or trying to increase your presence on social media.

Besides helping you out, repurposing your content can help you increase engagement and improve SEO. Let’s be real – we are all trying to increase our interactions and ranking each platform. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t go through all we go through to create and post our content. Additionally, it’s one of the most cost effective ways to produce content and keep your page relevant.

A Few Best Practices

• Create a Checklist: Determine how you will most effectively and efficiently update your content by creating a checklist of the necessary elements and steps. This can look like:

  • Update graphics with new statics or to meet the brand’s visual guidelines

  • Check that all internal and external links are still working and replace as needed

  • Verify the voice used is the same across the platform

  • Ensure that who you are targeting is looking for your keywords

• Throw Some Money Behind Updated Pieces: The extra boost, even if it is small, will help reach new audiences or put it back in front of old audiences through retargeting, increasing their chances of converting.

• Start with High-Performing Content: Users likely found this content engaging or helpful. If you can repurpose it, chances are it is still engaging and helpful. Repurposing it will make it new, increasing the platform’s chances of pushing it to new audiences.

How to Repurpose Your Content

1. Rewrite captions or edit blogs to utilize emotionally stimulating words: using words that people relate to on an emotional level is more likely to resonate with them, meaning engagement will be higher. Too much emotion can make people skip your content, so be sure to find a nice balance.

2. Merge repetitive content: After you have repurposed content a few times, you may find that content is starting to be repetitive. Merge this repetitive content to be one post; if you can, add it all to the best performing piece of content. This works great for blogs and you can redirect the old links to the “new” posts.

3. Change the formatting: This is one of the most popular ways to repurpose content; it is basically just pulling from one piece of content (video, blog, photo, etc.) and making something totally new with the same information. You can make a graphic with an excerpt from your blog to post on your socials and link back to your blog; you have now tapped into your social following to grow your blog. Maybe you posted a long video on YouTube; pull funny clips from it and make a reel or TikTok to post and gain traction for your YouTube page. There are endless ways to use the same content on different platforms by playing with the formatting.

4. Repost on new platforms. The same content you post on Facebook or Instagram can likely also be shared on Twitter or Pinterest; TikTok even has many of the same capabilities as Facebook and Instagram now that they have rolled out the still photo feature. Start taking advantage of this. Pull content from a year ago that you used on Facebook, assuming you still have the same aesthetic and voice, and post that as a new Pinterest post.

5. Update statistical information on infographics: We all know as research develops, statistics change. If you posted an infographic a year and a half ago, pull that, update your stats, and repost it as new content if it is still relevant to your overall goals.

6. Reshare with new imaging: content that performed well 6 months ago, will likely still perform well today. This is because users are likely still looking for the same information. Use this to your advantage by tweaking your imaging.

7. Share it as a throwback: Some of you may remember #ThrowbackThursday; today we usually just see “On this day a year ago…” or something like that. Utilize those throwback style posts to bring old content back into the view of your users or readers, especially if it performed well when it was first posted.

8. Rewrite or recreate evergreen content. Evergreen content is stuff that can pull in a lot of traffic but that is always relevant, no matter how much time has passed. You can tweak it very slightly to make it “new” – through verbiage, imaging, etc. – and reshare it with your audience and promote the same information again and again.

A few easy ideas of repurposing old content include but are not limited to: turning an old podcast into a new blog series, utilizing clips from full videos for TikToks and reels, pulling excerpts from your blog for an infographic to grab attention, and so on. The possibilities really are endless; we have repurposed a single piece of content over 30 times before! If you do not have time for all of this, we understand. That’s why we are here! Contact us today for your free strategy call and let us handle it all for you!