It’s a funny thing; if content is king, why are we creating tons of it, and then only sharing it one time?
It takes time and effort and many brain cells to create these posts. I have a sharing checklist I go through every time I publish a new blog post. But once that cycle is completed, then what? My post just gets pushed to the back of some corner of my site, to collect dust and never be seen again?
That’s just dumb!
There’s no reason why you can’t recycle content, as long as it’s evergreen.
Let’s just define that for a sec, shall we? Evergreen content is the stuff that is still valid one month, three months, or a year down the road. On my cooking blog, for example, I have a list of pumpkin recipes I throw up this time of the year. Some of them are several years old, but it doesn’t matter. The recipe itself is still good. So why not bust it out again? Especially given that it’s seasonal and topical.
Twitter, for the record, is an incredibly forgiving medium. You can send the exact same tweet on different days and at different times of the day, and not have to worry too much about the same people seeing it (and rolling their eyes). That’s because different people are online at different times, so there is not a ton of cross over. You could, of course, never do that on Facebook. But on Twitter, it’s legit.
I use Hootsuite to schedule my tweets, and here’s how I recycle evergreen content:
Upon publishing my blog post, I use the Hootlet to create a tweet. Before I send the tweet, I copy it in its entirety. I then go into Hootsuite and paste it in several times (sometimes I change up the wording a little, or swap in different hashtags, just to mix it up):
- 1 pm that day
- 8 pm the following day
- one autoscheduled tweet
- one scheduled for the next week
- one scheduled for the next month
I then paste the tweet into Hootsuite’s Bulk scheduler template. *NOTE: you need to be using Hootsuite Pro to access this feature.* You can use this in two different ways:
- Every time you publish a blog post, create a tweet about it and post it into the scheduler. Then, once a month, upload those tweets to your Hootsuite to ensure you have 1-2 tweets per day that are leading back to your blog, no matter what. I just keep adding my new posts to the top of the list, and when I reach the end of the month, I copy/paste the leftover tweets to another tab. I can use those the next month, so that my scheduled tweets don’t look the same month in and month out. Click for a great tutorial on how to use Hootsuite’s Bulk Scheduler tool.
- If your blog is seasonal, as my cooking blog is, you can create tabs for each month of the year in your template. Create tweets for each month, and then upload, to ensure you always have seasonal content that is going to perform well, because it’s what people will be searching for at that time of the year.
So there you have it! Don’t be afraid to recycle old content–it can, in fact, be a fantastic source of traffic to your blog.
