One of the biggest mistakes that I see companies and individuals make on social media is posting a piece of original content just once.

I call this “one and done.”

This is a mistake because people often miss your posts – they’re busy and may not be on social media or reading the email newsletter you sent them.

This is why it’s so important to reuse and repurpose your content.

First thing first, let’s go over the differences between reusing and repurposing content.

Repurposing content means turning your content into a different format and/or optimizing existing content for a new target audience.

Reusing content, on the other hand, is simply a way to take existing content and republish it as new – with minimal changes or no changes at all.

Think of one of your best performing blog posts – the one that consistently gets the most traffic and the most shares and comments. If you wanted to reach a new audience with a piece of content that you know gets results, you could repurpose it post by turning it into a video and publishing it on different channels, such as YouTube – and that’s what content repurposing is: turning a piece of content into something completely different.

Repurposing and reusing content enables you to cast a wider net with it and increase the odds that it will be seen by others.

It also saves you time so you don’t have to keep creating new content.

Also, not everyone who is following you now on LinkedIn or currently reading your blog was reading it months or years ago, And even if they were, it also doesn’t mean they saw every piece of content you published.

Updating old content also helps with search engine optimization. And the more successful one of your pieces of content is, the more shares and backlinks you get, which boosts your organic SEO.

Too often we make the mistake of publishing content, promoting it and moving on from it forever.

You don’t actually need to constantly create new content to be successful at social media marketing.

So what should you repurpose/reuse? The best content to repurpose is the content that has already proven itself to be successful: your most popular content. To find these, go through your analytics on email marketing, web site, blog posts and social media.

Also make a list of your evergreen posts or content that is timeless. Pieces like “what to do when you get a subpoena” or “why you need a will” are gifts that keep giving and should be regularly reposted. Updating a few lines in these pieces or adding links will increase their visibility and SEO.

Together with your most popular content from your website/blog, social media, and evergreen pieces you should have a good starting point to begin strategically repurposing your content.

In this video I explore ideas on how to more effectively reuse and repurpose your content using the images you already have such as headshots, past event photos, and practice area and blog images.

This is called owned media – creating news of your own with the assets you already have.

Reusing and repurposing your content helps you make the most out of your content.

Keeping a simple editorial calendar will help you manage repurposing and reusing posts.

Letting your content work harder and smarter for you is just smart marketing, so why wouldn’t you?