Not only are businesses told that their brand has to be everywhere their potential customer is, but businesses are also taught to educate and speak to their audience differently based on various social media platforms.
What’s posted on a business’ Instagram account is usually very different than what’s posted on their LinkedIn. It can feel like a headache. Figuring out what to post on each platform is time-consuming and – let’s face it – confusing (we all know how quickly social media algorithms change).
But there are 3 simple ways to make sure you always have something engaging and optimized to post on each social platform, without hours of design or research. Let’s stress less about what to share on social media, and focus more on our business.
1 – Repurpose What You Already Have
It’s easy to get lost in day-to-day tasks and forget about all of the awesome, value-packed content you’ve already created. Even blog articles from 6 months ago (as long as they’re evergreen) have tons of great information that your audience still benefits from.
Do an intake of your existing content including podcast episodes, blog articles, PDFs, videos, recorded webinars, speaker sessions, etc. Then queue those up to be shared on social media.
There are several ways to share your existing content in creative ways. You can:
- Directly share the link to where the content lives. BUT … If it’s a video, don’t post the link to YouTube. Upload it as native video so that it auto plays in people’s feeds. TIP: For Facebook and LinkedIn, once you paste the link in your status draft, remove the URL after it loads and and write engaging copy in its place. This way, it looks cleaner, like this:
- Scroll through impactful sections of your content and turn them into a simple image quote cards. Post that quote as a picture on your social media. This way, you don’t have to think of new things to say – you’re pulling from something you’ve already said or written. Here are a couple of image quote examples:
- Ask your partners or others featured in the content piece to share it as well on their social media. If it’s a podcast episode with a guest you interviewed, encourage them to share the interview on their profiles. Then once they post it, be sure to share it on your profiles (share, retweet, repost, etc.).
- Turn your existing content – whether it’s audio only, written, or video – into optimized video memes designed for social media. This Business 2 Community article teaches you exactly how to do that, step by step. It also explains the best sizes to post on social media, how to get more engagement from these videos, and more.
2 – Choose 4 – 5 Brands to Associate Yourself With
Who are other authorities in your industry that don’t compete with your product or service? Who serves your same audience, but in a bit of a different way? It might be an online magazine, blog, etc. Choose 4 – 5 brands who create lots of great educational content (that your team wouldn’t create) and share their knowledge.
If you’re a personal trainer who focuses specifically on building workout routines for clients, for example, find a brand that specializes in nutritional education and share some of their blog articles or videos on your social media to educate your audience full circle. Always make sure you tag that business to give them credit.
You can share their content one of 2 ways:
- Grab their content from their site or wherever it lives, and post it organically yourself.
- Share/ retweet/ repost something they’ve already posted.
We recommend doing both. If you are going to share something they’ve already posted, on Instagram you can use a tool called “Repost” that allows you to share their image or video. This option takes less time as the content already exists for you to share.
However, if you find a piece of content from one of these brands that you can’t find on their social media, download it and post it yourself and give them credit. Here’s an example of this with a Neil Patel video. Click “See More” to understand how the copy was done:
This also makes your social media less promotional and “salesy”; it’s clear you’re here to educate your audience and give them the best resources possible (even if it’s from other experts!). Also, not to mention, it builds great rapport with those brands.
Do this about once a week on all of your social profiles.
TIP: Use a Google Chrome extension like Save to Pocket to make this even easier. When you visit these few brands’ pages, you can bookmark awesome articles or videos of theirs that you’d like to share later. Batch them up so that the next time to go to post something, you already have links stored. This saves you even more time.
3 – Implement the Selfie-Style 1 Minute Videos
Dennis Yu, author of “Facebook Nation” which is taught in over 700 colleges and universities, has a ton of knowledge on social media engagement and posting.
In a recent interview, he stressed the importance and ease of posting short, one minute videos that are value packed that you simply record with your phone. Don’t edit these. Don’t script them. Film them and post them raw.
It’s great to film these while you’re doing something, like walking, cooking, etc. The point is to make them look natural and organic. This way, your audience relates to them. They’re also super short and to the point, your viewers don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to understand your message, and they connect more with your personal brand.
These 1-minute selfie videos in combination with the polished image quotes and memes from Hack #1 will add a ton of awesome variety to your feeds.
At the end of this article is an example of a selfie-style 1 minute video from Dennis himself (notice at the end he gives a shout out to the 1 minute video strategy!).
But overall, you don’t need to spend hours creating or researching things to post on your social media platforms in order to give your audience valuable, high-performing content. It’s about strategy, implementing what works, connecting with other authorities in your community to leverage audiences, and being as efficient as possible. These three hacks allow you to do all of that.
For those who want handfuls of social media assets created for them (those image quotes and video memes), that’s exactly what our team at Repurpose House specializes in, and we’d love to help.
Now, for that Dennis Yu example!
Life is a balancing act! If we focus on more than one aspect of our lives, another aspect suffers!
Posted by Dennis Yu on Saturday, April 13, 2019