5 Ways Repurposed Content Helps Audience Growth

We live in the age of content. But the new media landscape is deeply saturated, which is leading to a decline in social reach across the board. This, in turn, has created the difficult challenge of standing out in the crowd.

Still, the goal is the same as it's always been: Get your content not just to its maximum audience, but the right target audience. Oh, and make sure it's engaging on social and peaks traffic more than once a day. It's quite the task for content creation teams who have a lot on their plate already.

As the saturation showdown continues, the power of repurposing content isn't just as go-to filler for your content calendar — it's actually preferred and brings incredible benefits. Repurposing content can mean remixing your own media. For example, changing a video into an infographic, a photo series into a long-form article, and so on.

Repurposing your content is always a smart idea, but you can also remix content from others. Not only does it help your engagement, but it shifts the conversation from only talking about yourself. In fact, the static company blog is now the Achilles' heel of marketing efforts, and a death sentence to your social reach and credibility. But we don't mean stealing other people's popular posts, but rather remixing that content and making it your own.

You see this in the feeds all the time and probably don't notice:

So instead of heading to the social engagement graveyard, start taking advantage of remixed content. Here are five ways it can help you:

1. It's How You Build a Business

Repurposed content is so powerful that it's now what kicks off the lifecycle of a new media startup. Monetization machines start out using about 90% curated pieces when they launch. It's how we helped launch The Dodo, which is now one of the most popular new media companies in history. The Dodo built its brand and social presence by remixing pet and animal stories and videos, and posting them on their own platform. They're now one of the biggest new media companies to date.

Over time, repurposing kings like The Dodo will typically move from the 90/10 format to a 50% repurposed content and 50% owned media model. Once the property grows and becomes more robust, the content pendulum can fully swing around to a 10% curated and 90% original content arrangement. But by that time, the company is typically already receiving the right social traction to expand their own portfolio.

2. It Expands Social Awareness

It's true — frequently leveraging repurposed content helps social reach. The name of the game is quality content, right? So the more quality content you post, the greater your social reach will be.

If you remix content that aligns with your brand's goals and represents what you're aspiring to, it only reaffirms that you're a pillar of knowledge on a certain topic. For example, The Dodo posted a lot of cute cat videos that were repurposed. So over time — when you saw the exact, cute cat video you needed to cheer up your Monday — you weren't surprised that the content was from The Dodo. It's name recgonition at its finest--kind of like a digital campaign sign.

3. It Helps Your SEO

Its effect on SEO is probably the biggest fear surrounding repurposing content. That somehow duplicated content will not bode well in the eyes of the almighty, mysterious algorithm that determines a page's rank on Google. It's actually the opposite. Google takes into account relevancy of a topic for any search phrase you're trying to win. So if you're trying to get to page one for the search phrase "cute cat videos" (sorry — we can't stop using this example!), and your brand or new media company is sharing well-performing cat video content, it only helps your case for relevancy.

It's true!

4. It Diversifies Your Content

Is there anything worse than when you stumble across a brand's social channel and find that it might as well be an RSS Feed of their own stale content, always in the same format? Not only is this strategy circa 2003, it isn't favored on social at all. To get engagement, your content has to be dynamic, different, and live across all feeds.

For example, your content shouldn't just be all videos or photos. Repurposing content makes it easy to mix up mediums and learn more about what your audience actually responds to.

5. It Gives Content a Second Chance

Content doesn't always die at the end of a newscycle — not even your own. If you have a piece of evergreen content that's previously gone viral on social, repurpose it and let it live again! Remix the post's copy, format, and/or lead media to give it a second chance in the feed.

The same rule applies to repurposed content you've leveraged from others. If something did well on social, it likely will again. So extend the reach as much as possible. On the flip side, if there's a post that didn't perform particularly well for you, remix it and post it at a different time to see if the engagement changes.

Make It Part of Your Workflow

RebelMouse has a lot of tools to help you repurpose content from right within our Entry Editor. You can easily search for content on social platforms and embed it right into your post. It's how we've made social + content become BFFs.

If you're still lost, we're also a creative agency that offers content strategy services to make sure you're always growing. Join RebelMouse to get started. We make it easy.