Since early 2012, I have been writing a weekly feature on executive business and professional development topics for an executive briefing publisher. Within a daily executive intelligence briefing format focused on global events, the piece I write provides tips and suggestions for more effective strategic leadership.
One benefit of being on the hook to create a weekly, thousand-word article on topics I write and present about all the time is it’s sharpened my skills as I repurpose social media content. There are many reasons to not simply take what I've previously written and submit it as an article for the executive intelligence brief. The alternative is to find productive and effective ways to repurpose content that is already written.
If you are producing any amount of content across multiple channels (whether within one company or for multiple organizations), being very effective and efficient at being able to repurpose content is a valuable skill to develop.
We have all written list posts with more items than were required. After further reflection on these long list posts, you will like find ways to consolidate a few (maybe many) of the items on the list. So, consolidate away and write about new and fewer combined items on your revised list.
Pick one topic inside a multi-topic blog post. Pull the topic out from the remainder of the social media content and start writing in greater depth about it. Unshackled from having to account for the broader number and variety of topics in the original post, you can focus your exploration to create dramatically different content.
Take social media content you have already written and re-arrange its current flow into something new. This could include a different order for content to incorporate into the new piece or you can take specific sections in the original piece and integrate them as new topic sections.
If your pre-existing social media content includes specific section headers, use the section headers from the earlier piece and begin writing from scratch about topics related to the previously used sections.
Look for a current news story or up-to-date issues you can integrate into pre-existing social media content to freshen it up dramatically. This type of repurpose technique provides a new introduction for your older social media content or can suggest new points of emphasis given the current environment.
When you write an article there are often multiple angles you could pursue. Start writing from a similar set-up but write in two different directions. Writing two different pieces on the same topic but covering different aspects with different levels of depth is an ideal way to generate multiple pieces of new content at the same time.
If you already have considerable amounts of social media content on one or more topics, it is possible to create new content through pulling ideas from multiple older blog posts. You can put the extracted content together in new ways to make different points or uncover new ideas.
What ways are you finding to repurpose social media content and generate additional content in an extremely time-efficient manner? - Mike Brown
