The 4 golden rules of content repurposing

Content repurposing has many benefits. You’ll increase content reach, gain more readers/viewers/subscribers, and won’t have to create content from scratch for each platform—thus saving time and effort. But, if you don’t do it well, you won’t be able to reap these.

So, to help you, here are the four content repurposing golden rules that will teach you how to approach content repurposing.

1. Pick the right content to repurpose

Deciding which content to repurpose is half the winning strategy in content repurposing. Here are the four ways to get started:

a) Find evergreen content

Evergreen content is content that’s immune to short-term trends and stays relevant for years. For example, the blog “How to promote your content” is evergreen versus “2010 election results.”

People can read the post on content promotion two years from now, and it’ll still be helpful. The blog will continue attracting visitors for years. But, an article on “2010 election results” won’t matter 2-3 months from the publishing date.

So, dig through your archives, and find the evergreen content. Repurpose it.

b) Scan your analytics to find the best-performing content

Open your Google Analytics (for blog posts), social media analytics, and YouTube analytics to short-list content with higher engagement (reads, likes, shares, and comments) than the others.

These are content your audience loves. By repurposing those, you’ll increase your brand awareness and engagement.

c) Use BuzzSumo to find popular topics

BuzzSumo provides a list of trending content in your niche. For example, I typed “content marketing” in the search box. It showed me the list of articles with the most social shares. These are content that are trending now.

If you have content related to these, you can repurpose them and capitalize on the trends. Or you can create fresh content on similar topics and then repurpose them onto different platforms.

d) Repurpose new content

Whatever long-form content you’re creating—whether it be a webinar, YouTube video, blog post, or podcast—repurpose it into multi short-form content. It can be Reels/YouTube shorts, standalone graphic posts, carousel content, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, and more.

2. Tailor content to fit each platform

Content repurposing is not spamming your original content link on different platforms or copy-pasting content from one platform to another.

Remember, what format works on one platform won’t work on others. For example, Instagram users love videos—so its algorithm prefers Reels to graphic posts. Similarly, threads dominate Twitter, visual posts (videos and graphics) works wonder on Facebook, and short posts are the go-to format on LinkedIn.

In this sense, each platform is unique. Tweak content and adapt to the required format to suit the platforms’ audience expectations.

That means converting your original content (for example, say you want to repurpose your blog post) into Reels on Instagram, short video clips on YouTube, threads on Twitter, and videos on Facebook.

3. Focus on providing value to attract a new audience

Don’t just pull out random paragraphs from blog posts or snippets from a video and post them on different platforms. You should look for content that will either teach or inspire your audience.

For example, if you want to repurpose your article “How to promote your content” into a Reel, note down the post’s five or six (depending on how many you have included) steps. Prepare a video script (introduction, then mention the five steps and conclusion).

Similarly, pick out snippets from a long-form video that shares unique insights.

For example, here’s how we repurposed a long YouTube video into short-form content (Reels and shorts).

So, when you repurpose content, make sure you choose only those snippets that add value.

4. Use SEO strategically

One of the benefits of content repurposing is a boost in SEO. It provides you with higher organic traffic and brand awareness. All you have to do is use the target keyword in your repurposed content.

For example, if you’re repurposing a blog that targeted the keyword “email marketing,” mention it in your YouTube thumbnails and videos, Instagram Reels and captions, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, and so on.

Using the main keyword in every content helps search engines to crawl your content for a particular keyword and rank them.