Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an “art gallery” for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you’ve got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it’s a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So… check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing “sweet spot” by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a “best of” post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

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