Social media is all about value. You follow people for the value they provide, and vice-versa for those who follow you.
To many who use social media, a component of value is originality. You might be hesitant to repeat posts for fear of being viewed as spammy or unoriginal. But, with the right strategy, repeating posts is an essential move. Repeating your posts saves time, reuses your best past content, and gets that content in front of more people. Plus, it certainly doesn’t hurt when your social media management tool automates the process for you! 😉
You might spend hours writing the perfect blog post, only to share it once on social when it first gets published. If you only shared your blog post once, most of your audience would just never see your updates. The truth is, if you want to get the most from your content, you need to be repeating your posts (at least some of the time).
Why Repeating Posts Makes Sense ✔
Repeating past posts can be a social media lifesaver. Rather than writing a new blog post every day, save those hours by repeating posts about your best content from last month, or even last year (provided the topic is still relevant).
When you re-share your best content, you get it in front of more people. We talked about this in our post on Evergreen content. Each social media platform uses an algorithm that determines which of your followers see each update you share. These algorithms select a tiny segment of your audience to see each post, who may or may not be the most interested in that content. Each time your post is repeated, it reaches a different subset of your audience that hasn’t seen it.
Change it Up with Variations
Repeating posts isn’t as easy as copy-paste. Remember how social media is all about value? You need to make sure each post provides meaningful value to your audience. There is nothing wrong with repeating posts, as long as the content is still useful, relevant and interesting. SmarterQueue’s Variations feature means you can adjust the media or text when you’re scheduling your Evergreen posts, so you don’t have to worry about going back in and copying/pasting/editing.
There are a few ways to repeat posts that your audience will appreciate. These will make your repeated posts look authentic, compelling and very un-spammy.
- Adjust the text. One of the rules of smart reposting is never to use the same message twice. Remember, you’re not limited to just including the post title in your social share. Possible hooks could be a statistic or quote from your article or a witty comment. Both of these tactics will capture readers’ attention and encourage engagement. If you’re sharing a link with a compelling link preview title/image, you can share the same link several times, varying your post text to add a different comment/question/angle each time.
- Ask questions on the article topic. In the text of your post, ask a question of your audience to invite discussion on the topic. Questions that engage readers: “Are you still doing…”, “Would you believe that…” or “Are you looking for…”
- Change the image (if possible). Along with never using the same message twice, it is prudent to vary the imagery used as well. In repeated posts, attempt to use a different picture to represent the subject matter each time.
- Use varied hashtags. Finally, the hashtags that you use to accompany each post should be varied as well. There are certain tools out there that allow you to see the popularity of a hashtag over time. Use these resources to determine the best hashtags to accompany your post.
A/B Testing Posts
Don’t just leave it there – test and learn which type of Variations work best with your audience using stats-per-cycle analytics. This feature lets you see exactly which Variation got you the most engagement, clicks and reach.
How Often Should You Repeat Posts?
How often you repeat your posts depends on the type of content, your audience and your platform. For example, due to the fast pace of Twitter, sharing can be much more frequent. Facebook and LinkedIn merit fewer repeated posts, respectively.
How often you share can be a personal decision. When creating your posting schedule and frequency, think about how your efforts would be perceived. Put yourself in your followers’ shoes and ask yourself if anything about your strategy would be off-putting. If the answer is yes, then look to decrease how many times you repeat a post or how often you share your content.
Repetition Doesn’t Have to Be a Bad Thing
In the past, originality has been the key to winning the marketing battle for consumers’ attention. Now that we live in the age of social media, this is no longer the case. Originality is not the be-all-and-end-all if your audience didn’t see your content in the first place.
Repeating posts is a smart social strategy to share your content with more people and get the most mileage for the content you create. Creating a variety of posts with different text, imagery and hashtags will ensure you never come across as spammy and always add value for your followers.
SmarterQueue is the best tool to automate post recycling. With drag-and-drop scheduling, Evergreen recycling, Variations and content curation built-in, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!
