Repurposing Content: What It Is and How To Do It (+ Examples)

What is content repurposing?

It’s when you take a piece of existing content and change its format to adapt the content to another channel and audience. The most common example is reshaping your blog article into a social media post. Less obvious examples include creating a podcast or an ebook from existing content.

How does repurposing look in real life? Let’s say you have a blog article on B2B email marketing you’d like to promote. The quickest way to repurpose the piece is creating social media posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. So you create a hook (for Twitter) or more structured copy (for LinkedIn), make sure you stick to the character limit, and include a CTA to the article. Voila.

What content repurposing isn’t

It’s not simply repeating yourself. The example of turning a blog article into a social media post makes repetition impossible at least for a technical reason: social media posts need to be much shorter. But even if you could copy and paste an entire article, it wouldn’t perform well. You have to adapt to the audience’s preferences. These preferences shift based on the medium used — so even using the same bit of copy on similar platforms (e.g. posting the same text as a tweet and a LinkedIn post) won’t do the trick.

Content repurposing also isn’t taking someone else’s content — that’s just plagiarism. And even if you rewrite it so it isn’t technically the same, ask yourself: why does the message of another brand apply this well to you? You should stand out, not blend in with your competitors.

Cross-posting and reposting are also quite separate from repurposing content. Cross-posting means posting the exact same thing on different platforms, e.g. the same Instagram Reel as a YouTube Short. While reposting is simply posting the same piece of content on the same platform.

Benefits of repurposing content

Content repurposing helps in several ways. Here are some of the more popular ones:

It saves time. Creating a new piece of content from scratch will always be more time-consuming than taking a ready piece and reshaping it. Of course, not all content repurposing is straightforward: For example, if you need an illustration or a video recording, it will take time. But still not nearly as much as drafting something from scratch.

It boosts your effectiveness. This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. Repurposing content is easier, takes less time and effort — and so can be done on a scale — without your content creators burning out.

It increases your reach. We’ve already touched on that. The gist of repurposing content is adapting it to a different audience on another channel. Your readers might not have seen the original post — or they might simply choose to consume all their content in a specific form (e.g. tweets) or on the same channel (e.g. TikTok).

It’s good for SEO. Search engine crawlers pay attention to the content different sites pump out. The more content you produce on closely related subjects, the higher the chances Google will consider you an industry expert on the subject. Repurposing helps with that.

Tips for repurposing content

There are several things worth going over before you hash out a content repurposing strategy. 

1. When to repurpose content

When you have a backlog of content already, you can start repurposing it right away. Focus on the better-performing pieces and see how they do on other channels (e.g. how your repurposed blog posts perform when turned into infographics on Instagram).

Repurposing content matters when you are starting to use a new social media channel. Most of these will reward you for an initial spike of activity — so simply adapting the content you already have will make that spike easier to achieve.

2. What content to repurpose

Your best-performing content should be repurposed first, before you move on to your evergreen content (i.e. content that stays relevant over a long period of time). Time-sensitive pieces (like updates and news) should be repurposed right away — they will get old fast.

You can also give your old pieces a new look and repurpose them as well. Go over your older articles, update the facts, quotes, design elements (such as infographics), re-publish them — and then repurpose them for other channels.

Let’s say you have a blog article on how public relations and email marketing work together. In essence, it’s an evergreen post, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drive additional traffic to it a year or two after it’s been published. However, the bulk of work here will boil down to updating use cases — and adapting copy accordingly to reflect new trends.

3. How to prioritize content for repurposing

Should it be your old content or new content? There’s no one right answer — it will depend on your goals. Repurposing older content makes sense if you want to attract additional traffic to pieces that once did well but are now at a content decay stage. Repurposing newer content works better if you want to extend your reach and raise brand awareness.

4. How to integrate content repurposing into your workflow

The best way to easily repurpose content is to keep it in mind during the creation stage. For example, if your blog and Twitter or LinkedIn are your most popular and oldest channels, you should craft your blog article in such a way that it can be easily replicated as a tweet or LinkedIn post.

Think about the main hook, how easily the structure can be carried over, and even which accompanying graphics can grab attention as an in-post image. Creating social posts after you are done with the blog post will be much easier this way.

5. Which channels to target when repurposing content

We’ll say right away you shouldn’t target all the existing channels, or, God forbid, create social media accounts on platforms where you have no presence solely to repurpose content. Otherwise repurposing becomes a gigantic effort bearing little to no fruit.

Target just two or three channels that work best for your business. This has three main benefits:

• You won’t be putting a strain on yourself by repurposing something 10 times.
• You will be certain that your presence on these platforms (e.g. how long you have had an account, how many posts you’ve published) will attract some traffic.
• Content repurposing will be a part of your overall marketing strategy, on top of creating unique posts for these channels.

Examples of repurposing content

The easiest repurposing strategies to implement revolve around your blog posts. We’ll start with those, before moving on to less common ways to repurpose content. Keep in mind most of these transformations work both ways: so if you can make a video out of a blog post, you can also turn a video into a blog post.

Turning blog posts into social media posts

Doing this kills two birds with one stone: driving organic traffic to your blog and providing value to your different audiences.

Blog posts can easily be turned into text-based social posts (for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), but they also lend themselves to more graphic ways of presenting content. You can make an image carousel, extract quotes for a post on Instagram or Pinterest, or create an infographic.

Here’s how we visualized our research on the use of emojis in email marketing by turning it into an Instagram carousel.

Converting long-form written content into video or audio

If it’s an in-depth post or a report, you can record a YouTube video for your channel. Just make sure you use the post as a basis, not a direct script for the video. Simply reading off the post won’t be catchy — it needs to be adapted because we consume text and video differently.

This is what we did when we turned a blog post on how to monetize your email subscribers’ list into a 5-minute YouTube video that captures the essence of the article.

However, you can also make shorter videos, such as YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. These can be up to 60 or 90 seconds respectively, so you’ll need short chunks of info with clear takeaways to make it work. TikToks, meanwhile, can be quite long: up to 60 minutes if the video was recorded off the platform — and up to 10 minutes if TikTok itself was used to shoot it.

And if you are sniggering about relying on TikTok marketing as part of your strategy, don’t: it’s one of the fastest-growing players on the social media scene.

Finally, there’s no reason why you can’t turn a blog post into an audio-only format — for example, a podcast. If whatever you say on-screen in a video would work without the picture, you’ve got yourself a podcast. Stats tell us podcasts are very popular among Millenials and Gen Z (50%-60% of representatives from both have listened to one in 2022).

Transforming blog posts into email newsletters — and vice versa

Blog posts can be distilled to their very essence and adapted for your email subscribers to consume. You’ll need a catchy subject line and sharp body copy to keep your readers’ attention. Dropping a link to the fully-fledged blog post with a CTA will attract additional organic traffic to your blog.

That’s exactly what we did after Google and Yahoo rolled out new requirements for bulk email sending. First, we published an article on the matter, before sending out an email newsletter to our subscribers.

Doing the reverse thing works as well: you can take your well-performing newsletter editions and turn them into in-depth blog posts. A good rule of thumb here is to wait a day or two after the original newsletter was sent before publishing the blog: your email subscribers will appreciate exclusive access to the content before the rest of your readers.

Merging Twitter threads into LinkedIn posts — and vice versa

If you have a thread where you break down a concept — a fad that caught on at some point — you can transform it into a LinkedIn post. Twitter and LinkedIn are somewhat alike because both are text-first social platforms where images are secondary.  The key difference here is post length: 280 characters for a single post on Twitter vs 3,000 characters on LinkedIn.

Of course, you can also break down a longer LinkedIn post into smaller tweets for a Twitter thread. This is what Chima Mmeje did with a post about AI.

Breaking up long-form videos into shorter snippets

This one is kind of obvious. If you have a long(ish) YouTube — or TikTok — video, you can break it up into smaller content pieces and post these as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Keep in mind you’ll be limited to 90 seconds at best, so you’ll need either snappy takeaways or valuable insights squeezed into this timeframe.

This is something Cleo Abram — a journalist discussing technology on her YouTube channel — does well. She made a fully-fledged YouTube video into an Instagram Reel, encouraging followers to watch the whole thing.

Wrapping up

Content repurposing means taking a piece of existing content and posting it on different channels after adapting it for said channel and target audience preferences. Repurposing content helps you save time (it’s not as hard as creating something from scratch), increase your reach on different channels, boost your effectiveness, and even improve your SEO metrics.

You can start thinking about content repurposing if you already have a backlog of content. You should start with your better-performing and evergreen pieces before moving on to everything else. Start thinking about repurposing content at the creation stage already and pick only a couple of channels for content posting. Prioritize the channels where you have a real established presence.

You can play around when repurposing, making videos and graphics out of blogs, turning visual aids into text, and breaking up or consolidating existing pieces. We hope we’ve given you enough information and examples of content repurposing to go on above.