Next in our series on making content creation easy is learning how to repurpose your social media captions!
This is a great option for you if posting on Instagram or Facebook comes super easy to you, but sitting down to writing a blog post from scratch or a video script feels too time-consuming. Let’s cut out half that time by taking your easy social posts as the basis for blog posts, podcast episodes, and videos.
Repurpose Your Social Media Posts for Blog Posts
This is where I like to start first – and it’s surprisingly easy!
OPTION 1: From a platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, you can copy and paste your long captions and use them directly as blog posts. Depending on how long the caption is, it may be able to stand alone as a blog post, albeit on the smaller side (e.g. maybe it’s a 500-word blog post instead of a 1000 word blog post.) And you know what? If that’s the difference between you getting a blog post out or not, a small one is A-OK! 
Another way to make this even easier is to use the picture that accompanied the social media caption as an image for your blog post. This is particularly the case on Instagram where have to put up an image, but you may also use photos and graphics frequently on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook as well.
You can reuse the image from social as the featured header image for the blog post, or simply as one of the images strewn throughout the text.
This saves you time because you’re probably only going to need to go and source another two to three maximum additional photos for the blog post from a stock photo website or one of your brand images.
OPTION 2: the second way to repurpose social media captions for blog posts is that you can riff off of your shorter posts. Take that Facebook update you wrote as inspiration for a full blog article simply by expanding on the topic, like adding examples and anecdotes. For example:
- how did you learn about this for the first time?
- What happened when one of your clients figured this out with you?
Another way to expand on a shorter post is to acknowledge common rebuttals that you’ve gotten in the past for this opinion, especially if you’re sharing something that’s a little bit controversial, or is a new way of thinking about an old standard. Even a tweet you wrote that generated a lot of responses could be a great opportunity.
Repurposing popular social media posts as blog posts not only helps you get more content into the world, but also gives you a more spacious venue to you show your audience that you understand where they’re coming from.
In some cases, you can restate the original post as the first paragraph, and then you can riff on it by saying, “At this point you might be thinking…” That ideal client will be struck that you anticipated their thoughts (you’ve clearly been paying attention to people like them!), and now they’re really curious about what you could possibly say next in defense of your argument.
Just like in Option 1, if your social media caption had a photo accompanying it, you can repurpose it for this type of blog post too.
OPTION 3: This is an easy peasy way to repurpose that candid, spur-of-the-moment social content, like Facebook Lives and Instagram stories. When you share anecdotes and education in this format, make sure you save (or auto-download) the videos, transcribe them if you need to (using software like otter.ai), and then basically go back to Option Two and riff off them!
Repurpose Your Social Media Posts for Newsletters
Guess what – newsletters don’t have to be super long! (Yay!)
And they don’t have to be super visually designed either. Depending on your style, and especially in the world of online, service-based business owners, your newsletter is like a text-only, short love letter to your audience. In this case, the text from a social post may be just the right kind of tone to send to them as a newsletter as well!
Repurpose Your Social Media Posts for Video/Podcasts
Your social posts may also inspire you to make videos for YouTube or IGTV, and even to record podcasts. Especially if you don’t make hugely long videos/podcast content, your social media caption may be enough of a topic for you to go off directly.
First, reread the post, start thinking about what you can add to it or express better out loud through your tone, and then put your camera/mic on and see what comes out. If you’re a verbal processor, this may be a really fantastic option for you. You can always go back and edit it down a bit to cut out any repetitive sections or phrasings that don’t accurately reflect your opinions. You can also definitely go back and record a separate intro outro.
Conclusion
Isn’t it kind of mind-blowing that you can repurpose something so easy and succinct as a social media post? Download my Free Guide to Repurposing to learn additional ways to repurpose your social media posts for other content (including Lives and talks), as well as repurposing blog posts, podcasts, and videos.
