How to repurpose content for social media in 3 easy steps [2022 Guide]

You did it.

You’ve been working for hours on the perfect content piece for the longest time.

Maybe it was a podcast episode, a video, a long-form blog post, or infographic.

You’re proud of it. You put it out there, and to your surprise… crickets.

Maybe you weren’t so surprised - given the volume of content that gets published every day, there’s so much content out there that quality or quantity are no longer substitutes.

Along with distribution - quality and quantity have never been more important to nail as a content marketer than in 2022 and beyond.

You may have realised that maybe there’s a way to repurpose your existing content to extract more valuable content assets.

The best content marketers make it a habit to always be repurposing content.

It’s a smart way to get more content in less time, and also helps to drive coherence and consistency around a topic that you’re looking to build thought leadership around.

Here is the 5 step process to repurpose content for social media:

1. Identify the video assets you want to repurpose

2. Decide on the key moments to be repurposed

3. Repurpose the video into social cutdown clips

4. Transcribe the video and use that for image quotes

5. Use the rest of the transcription to rework as an article

6. Turn the video into an mp3 recording to use as a podcast

7. Publish, measure, learn, repeat.

This is article part of a larger series on repurposing content in 2022.

Do you think your content should be everywhere, or only on specific platforms?

I believe that your content should be everywhere you can - because humans (your customers or audience) are everywhere.

The good news is that through repurposing content, you will be able to hit more platforms and contextualise the different pieces based on the asset format (for example square or horizontal images) as well as captioning (e.g: business-focused on LinkedIn, vs. cool and casual on LinkedIn).

Having said that, when resources are limited, you have to prioritise the platforms that are most important to your business.

For most in B2B, it’s LinkedIn, and one other one.

Horizontal Images - LinkedIn, Twitter

Square Images - Instagram, Facebook

Horizontal Video - YouTube, Twitter (and sometimes LinkedIn)

Square Video - LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook

Audio Podcast - Soundcloud, Spotify, iTunes

Written Content - Your website, Medium, LinkedIn [natively], Quora

1. Identify the video assets you want to repurpose

Repurposing your long videos is one of the easier ways to extract a ton of valuable content in the shortest amount of time.

Ideally, your long videos should be part of an ongoing series - like a webinar or a video podcast series.

This makes it easier for you to be able to build a repeatable content repurposing workflow. 

Choose the asset based on the repurposable value in it.

Ask yourself these questions:

Is this content evergreen?

Did this content get as much distribution as it deserves?

Can this content be broken down into multiple content pieces of standalone value?

Do I have ideas on how I can make this engaging in video, audio, image and written form?

Once you have prioritized your existing content pool based on your answers to the questions above, you should now have a shortlist of videos ready to be repurposed.

2. Decide on the key moments to be repurposed

This is the part that tends to be scary for most people. Where do you even begin identifying the best parts to repurpose out of an existing video podcast, webinar, or similar long-form video content?

There's a couple of ways to do it.

Option 1: Manually

Grab a pen and paper, a cup of coffee, and start listening to or skimming through the video to identify key moments.

Note the timestamps of these key moments, and decide when you'd like each clip to start and end.

Also, note any other interesting remarks or ideas that came to you while listening to the video.

Granted this may take a long time, so fear not - there is an easier way.

Option 2: Upload to chopcast

Once you upload your video to chopcast, it will analyze the key moments for you.

From there, you can get auto-generated clips (more on that in a bit), or create and edit your own with ease by taking one of the suggested topics or searching for your own keywords.

If you already have some topics or keywords in mind, you can search for those too and get instant clip recommendations that you can tweak further.

3. Repurpose the video into social cutdown clips

One of the biggest benefits of repurposing content is the ability to save so much time by reusing and upcycling the existing content you have to create new forms of content, and often in bite-size form which drive even more engagement due to people's shortening attention spans - especially on social.

One of the most powerful applications of this is creating social cutdowns.  

They’re often easier to consume, travel further, and appeal to your persona in different ways based on their preference in consuming content.

Read and watch: How we edited a zoom recording using chopcast in minutes not hours.

Social cutdown clips are selected segments from a longer video that are often subtitled and designed for a social media audience.

You can use chopcast to develop your ideas further into subtitled clips that you can then export as square, horizontal, or vertical videos to suit your various social platform use cases.

If you're still stuck for ideas, you can also download the auto-generated clips that chopcast created for you based on the key moments it's identified.

For example, someone may listen to your podcast (extracted audio) while commuting, someone else may have just arrived at their office and saw some of your image content which makes them send the article it is based off to someone else on their team because they may find value in it.

Someone else may come across the subtitled microcontent subtitled videos from your episode during their lunch break which encourages them to start a chat on your website.

The important thing when repurposing content is to have a mechanism by which you can measure, through first-touch attribution, the effectiveness of each piece.

An easy way to do this is to create tracking links that track content pieces based on topic, format, and medium.

This way, you’re able to provide a detailed breakdown to your leadership team about what seems to be working - making you the new marketing office hero.

Because let’s face it, content marketing is sometimes hard to measure. But with the aforementioned method, you have a foolproof way to deploy, measure, and scale your results based on data and market response.

4. Transcribe the video and use that for image quotes

One of the easiest things you can do to multiple the value of your content and repurpose it for social media is to transcribe it.

There are many services and freelancers out there that can help you transcribe your content.

Using chopcast, you can automatically get a ready-made text transcript of your video, among other formats (more on that later).

The important question here is what will you do with this transcript?

One of the things you can easily repurpose using the transcript is creating image quotes.

Simply take the parts that are most meaningful to you, and apply an image template to them using Canva (here are some starting templates).

5. Use the rest of the transcription to rework as an article

Text transcripts can help provide you with ideas to more quickly write your next SEO-optimized article on the topic.

By having a body of text from the transcript, you can then take steps to summarize the content into 3-5 key points, and begin building an article around that.

In some cases, you may decide to create a post where you embed the original video and a supplementary text transcript alongside it.

Don't forget that you can also rework the text transcripts in several other ways, including using them for copy for your next newsletter or social posts while you're promoting these assets.

5. Turn the video into an mp3 recording to use as a podcast

Using chopcast, you can also download an mp3 version of the video to share on podcast platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

However, make sure that the type of video you decide to turn into an mp3 does not rely heavily on needing visual aids.

If your source file is a video podcast or similar conversational talk, then you're golden. If it's a webinar or other educational material, it pays to check first that it will make sense for an audio-only audience.

The easiest way to verify this is to listen to the video without looking at the screen.

If you believe it still drives value, then you have just opened yourself up to a new audience that values audio-only content.

Audio-only content and podcasts are rising in popularity due to their hands-free nature, and the ability for people to multitask while consuming your content.

If you can, make use of it!

6. Publish, measure, learn, repeat.

According to research from Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant, quantity matters more than quality. To give this more context, quantity is what helps us arrive at quality - especially as we are starting out. 

Having said that, measuring your progress and learning from how your audience responds will help you better test your hypotheses for what is resonating most with them.

No need to start with a target if it's your first time repurposing. Consider your first campaign as your benchmark campaign.

Similar to working out, you're only ever competing with your own personal best as a brand.

Repurpose video content with ease

We shared some easy and practical tips to get the most out of your [video] content.

Specifically, longer videos (10 mins and more) and content repurposing go hand in hand due to the richness of the format, and the ability for you to extract multiple microcontent ideas from it.

Have fun putting these into practice!