How to Become a Content Machine: A Step-by-Step Guide to Repurposing your Content

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Learn how to properly repurpose content

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How to Become a Content Machine: A Step-by-Step Guide to Repurposing your Content

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The creator’s game is an infinite game as there’s always the next piece of content to create.

~~But more content isn’t the answer to real growth.~~

The problem is that “the supply of content is growing, but demand is static.” In other words, the people on the receiving end of all this content are only going to consume so much. Their demand isn’t growing with the supply.

To realize growth as a creator, the answer can’t just be to increase content production proportionally to the growth goals you need to achieve.

This is why repurposing your content is crucial.

Content repurposing is taking your old content and breathing new life into it. It’s repurposing that same idea but in 100 different ways. Don’t worry about iteration, everything we know around us is built upon iteration.

Not only is repurposing your content a great way to get more out of your content, but it’s also a way to get ahead in such a competitive content landscape.

And finally, it’s a way to deliver even more value to your audience.

Most creators think they should create the next viral hit from scratch. But, what if the secret to growth lies in our own content? After all, published content got feedback from your audience. It got engagement or not.

That’s your validation.

It’s time to extract the most value out of your content and repurpose your content like a wizard.

Here’s our 5-step process to become a content machine:

Copy & Paste

Excerpt

Update

Categorize

Curate

Use data to find your best content

In this part, we list the different methods to figure out how you can find the right content to recycle.

No matter your approach, the goal here is to find content that:

Did well with your audience (many likes, comments, private conversations initiated)

Didn’t do well with your audience, but you feel there’s still potential to get more success

Twitter Analytics

Screenshot taken for analytics.twitter.com

The first time you land on the Analytics page of Twitter, you might feel overwhelmed.

The arrows in the picture above indicate the most important options to check out:

Setting the time period

Selecting your top tweets

Viewing the details per tweet

Let’s break down the different metrics and how to interpret them:

Impressions: The number of (new) users you reached

Likes: The number of people that liked your content, but we don’t know much more

“Getting Likes is easy. It’s a light action. Anything else requires trust” – Jon Loomer

Profile clicks: Your content made people interested to read more of your content

Comments: you evoked a form of emotion and people wanted to share their thoughts

Pro tip: DM the people that responded as soon as possible. Ask them what made them reply, or thank them for certain engagement. Initiate a genuine conversation.

A retweet: the holy grail of engagement: You said something someone always wanted to say.

💡

You can learn more about how to use Twitter Analytics by reading our post: Twitter Analytics: Understanding and using data to grow your account

Tweet Hunter

Like we shared in the intro, there lies so much hidden gold in your own content.

With the Search Function of Tweet Hunter, you’re one step closer to recycling your best work.

Search for your own handle, find your top-performing content, and save it for future usage.

Organizing your thoughts

It’s great when you know what content does well, but that isn’t everything you need to do.

You need to have a system in place that allows you to manage your content.

You can use the Twitter bookmark’s feature, craft a swipe file with tools like Notion or Airtable, or, you can choose to use the extended features of Tweet Hunter.

Fellow creator @ Alex Llull shows us how it’s done perfectly:

You select what tweet you want to add to your swipe file

You “star” it

You choose into which folder you want to save it

You go to your swipe file and start with the recycling

Saving and managing your content is an essential part of your repurposing strategy.

5 tactics one can use to recycle content:

1. Copy, Paste & Repost

We start with the most obvious one: copy and paste your content.

You’ve already done the heavy lifting: you’ve created your piece of content, published it on Twitter, and waited. You hear a little bit more than crickets.

As creators, we don’t do this that often, because we think that our whole audience sees everything we put out.

That’s just not how the world works.

Like yourself, your audience has other things to do.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself and re-publish your content on Twitter every once in a while.

As long as you know your content helps your audience solve a particular problem, you’re doing them a favor.

Being a creator is building your own content library. One piece at a time.

2. Excerpt

Excerpting involves grabbing individual pieces from the content to use elsewhere.

You can take a tweet from your thread to use as a single tweet.

Using the native Search function of Tweet Hunter allows you to find the content that most resonated with your audience. Save your best-performing to your Evergreen Collection to edit it later.

How does this work?

You can easily repurpose a thread into many single tweets.

How?

Search for a well-performing thread using Twitter Analytics

Go through each of the tweets

Figure out which tweets resonated the most with your audience (look at likes, replies or shares)

Post that tweet as a single tweet – with or without editing

3. Categorize your own work

Thinking that everyone always reads all your content is madness.

That’s why you need a way to categorize your own work.

A great way to do this is by creating a running thread. Every time that you add a new tweet to the thread, it shows up on the feed of your followers. It’s a good idea to use a running thread as your pinned tweet to show (potential) followers more about your story.

4. Update

Being in the game for a long extent of time probably means you have a shitload of content.

Content that’s been validated by your audience. No engagement is feedback as well. You know what worked and what didn’t.

How?

By looking at the engagement: likes, comments, shares.

Yes, to a certain extent, those are vanity metrics, because they don’t pay your bills.

But, they do show what content resonates with your audience and which content didn’t.

You’ve probably already got a goldmine of content that could have a second life with a little extra love and attention.

There are different things you can do:

Add information: As a creator, you learn along the way. Don’t be afraid to add new information to provide the most value possible.

Replace outdated information: on average, evergreen content outweighs temporary, trending content. So, the more you can make your content up-to-date, the better it performs.

Change the layout: switching up the visual representation of your content helps with readability. And, this increases the reading time.

Add visuals or make a video

Change the tone

Looking for extra inspiration?

Here are 8 templates that work well on Twitter.

5. Curate

Finally, the last method of repurposing your content: curation.

Curate the content of others and share this with your audience.

Be like Netflix.

Netflix initially only published other content. They collected data on what resonated with their audience and what fell flat. Then, they started producing their own content.

You should do the same. Curate others’ content to share with your own audience. It comes down to bundling existing content as a new piece altogether.

Things you can create:

Create collections by theme ( “the best blog posts about SaaS startups”)

Create collections by demographic (“10 podcasts every creator should listen to”)

Create collections based on time (“Best performing threads of November”)

Use the Create section of Tweet Hunter to get inspired by the work of your favorite creators.

A great example of a creator that curates the content of others, is Dylan Redekop. Every week, he sends out the best content he found of other creators, in his newsletter Growth Currency.

Curating the right content unlocks great inspiration to create new and unique content.

Conclusion

Don’t worry too much that your audience will notice that you repost or recycle your content.

Here’s what happens when you repost something:

Half of the audience has seen it before but doesn’t remember it

The other half hasn’t even seen it

As long as you believe that your audience appreciates your content (why would they otherwise follow you?), you’re actually doing them a favor.

To make sure you provide the most value possible, keep in mind that:

You shouldn’t repost the same things every week.

The updated version should be better than the original

When a recycled piece of content still doesn’t work, ditch it

Overall, we can say that recycling content doesn’t hurt. Not for you, and not for your audience:

You save time and get to post more content. Your audience gets more chances to see your content and get value. It’s a win-win.

It was hard enough to create your content, don’t waste it by only using it once. By repurposing your content you create your own library of Alexandrium – one piece at a time.

Let’s summarize the benefits of repurposing your content: