When It Comes to Social Media, Use What You’ve Got

By Kathryn Will

Keeping up with customers and leads on multiple social media platforms can seem overwhelming. You need to engage your customers and offer relevant content in order to build and keep their interest—but how? Allow existing content, such as case studies, customer questions, client testimonials, blog posts, and white papers or reports to drive your social media marketing.

You may think you need to create new content every time you post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google+, but your social media life will be much easier when you take inventory and use what you already have.

Repurposing your content helps you reach more people in more places, says Social Media Examiner, the world’s largest online social media magazine, and it gives your content a longer lifespan.

Where to look for content

Your company has content to use. Even something as simple as a list of frequently asked customer questions can be turned into a great piece of social media content.

If your business offers any kind of tips or best practices, a great technique is to put that information online and then re-share it, either in its entirety or one tidbit at a time. This gives your customers and leads useful information and it doesn’t create any extra work on your end because the content has practically created itself. Customer testimonials from your social media channels can also be reused in this way.

Whitepapers or reports are great social media resources, too, as they can be segmented and shared again and again. An interesting statistic or fact can be tweeted and linked to the original report.

Also consider repurposing existing industry-relevant articles from other sources and providing your own unique commentary, including how the news relates to your clients.

Change things up

When it comes to repurposing, you can also consider using the same piece of content for your different social media channels.

Long-form articles or whitepapers might be just fine for LinkedIn, but visual content tends to perform better on Facebook and even Twitter, says Social Media Examiner, with posts getting more shares, likes, and retweets than posts without photos.

Tools such as SlideShare, Haiku Deck, or Canva can help you turn text-heavy content into image-based material.

Cultivate a plan to take inventory of things you and your staff have already created, including everything from case studies and presentations to client stories and annual reports. Once you know what you’ve got, you can think about where best to first use that content, and how to reformat it for more mileage.