Remix, Reuse, Reshare: The Content Performance Trinity
The floodgates are open
It is no secret that social channels have become flooded with information. Good content flows from the internet into our social feeds like a firehose. This simple fact has a plethora of implications but one of the hardest to overcome is how short the lifespan of any given piece of social content has become. As soon as you post your content, it starts aging rapidly. On most social networks, it is ancient news within just a few days.
This makes the high cost of producing quality original content even higher. Most businesses cannot justify that cost so they fall into a pattern of simply resharing other people’s original content. This is wonderful for keeping up engagement and feeding your audience but ultimately, it will never have as high an impact on your brand as producing your own content.
On your mark, get set, race to the bottom...
Many companies have sprung up to produce mass quantities of content very cheaply for use on social media and blogs. Of course, the problem with most of these purveyors is that the quality and originality is very low. And even at just a few hundred dollars per piece, the cost is still fairly high when the content only gets a few likes and shares. A poor quality piece of content is never going to get more shares so your total reach is next to nothing and your cost per like is astronomical. If the quality isn’t there, it is nearly impossible to justify the costs.
That is why we have proposed a new strategy for content sharing which, honestly, isn’t rocket science. It is so simple and straightforward in fact that people often don’t see it sitting right in front of their faces. Our proposition is to simply apply the same reposting practices to your own content, but with a twist.
Remix, Reuse, Reshare
It has become the standard practice of really savvy social marketers to post any given piece of content they make at least a few times based on the quality of the piece. At least 2 or 3 times during the first week of it being published and then a handful of times more over the following months, assuming it stays relevant.
We are proposing to take it a step further and not only repost it in it’s current form but to also remix that content to take it even further. Take for example, this situation: You film a 2-minute video explaining your product or interviewing the founder of your company which is the core piece of content that you need for your website. From that core content, you could easily produce several 5-15 second snippets that can be shared on social and entice people to watch the full-length video. You could cut all the shots of your product being used for one use case into a quick 15 second summary. Or take just the 15 seconds of your founder talking about the start of the company. Or you can take those pieces and combine them with past content to completely refresh that old content and share it again.
By approaching content this way, you drastically increase the lifespan of all the content you produce. Below is a hypothetical posting schedule if you produced 3 pieces of video content and then also produced just one shorter, bite-sized version of each of the videos.
3 pieces of original content can last you a total of 6 weeks by simply resharing them 3 weeks later and remixing them into a shorter bite sized length that you share in between the full-length versions.
To give you a real world example, our client was running a Kickstarter campaign on a tight budget so we had to make the most of anything and everything that we did. With only one shoot, we made an explainer video for Kickstarter, a video to go on their website (which would live on even after the Kickstarter campaign) and short shareable snippets.
Full Video
15-Second Version
45-second Version
We also used the logo (which we did *not* make) to create an intro bumper and an explainer animated GIF that was on the Kickstarter page, the website and social channels. With just one shoot, there was content for weeks.
recipe for success
The core concept that makes this approach so successful is the idea that the hardest and most time consuming part of the content creation process is simply researching and fleshing out your ideas. Once you have developed all of the assets, it barely takes any time at all to reconfigure them into a million different ways and because so many people miss out on the first time you post something, they don’t get burned out from seeing your content.
So the next time you are producing content for your business, start thinking about how each piece can be remixed to multiply your total output and get better performance out of every dollar you spend.