In the nearly three years since the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.
After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.
You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.
In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.
Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.
But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?
Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.
Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.
Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.
How resharing impacts SEO
Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:
BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.
So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.
Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.
With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.
But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.
1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look
Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.
We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.
One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:
Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.
There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.
So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!
2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content
When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.
Okay, a LOT disheartening.
You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)
But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.
The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.
Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)
If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.
Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)
3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences
“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”
Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.
This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.
That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.
Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:
Option A
Option B
Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.
Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.
4 - Automate, automate, automate
Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.
Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.
Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.
(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)
Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.
Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing
It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.
And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.
Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.
How are you squeezing every ounce of value out of your content?
Do you have a content resharing strategy for your brand?
Jayson DeMers, the founder of Audience Bloom, puts it aptly
"The real value of content marketing is in the distribution channels."
I personally am resharing, updating and repurposing it on social media channels that best suit and benefit what I do, and I collaborate with groups and communities with people that are as same influential as me.
P.S - Thanks for this post Jen :)
Your article refresh my day. I almost think of no way to reshare/exploit the published old content until this article refresh me. Thanks Jen. <3
Good points. I would like to add besides resharing the article or post on social media you can repurpose it, post it at various places and then share the repurposed piece also.
Example a popular post can be converted into a presentation and a video and posted at appropriate sites and then shared again
That's a great idea Joseph. My industry is one of the boring ones that doesn't get much social traction. But, converting a good blog into a whiteboard video could totally work for us. Thanks!
Great idea! I know a lot of writers who get better traction with a post as a SlideShare, say. Thanks for the comment!
Jen, I have been practicing a lot on revamping and re-sharing the content and I must say, I have been successful for most of the times. But, I am really impressed by the situations you've covered here. There are times when we get huge amount of likes and shares, but, it is really worrisome to see ZERO clicks on the posts.
I enjoyed two things here: Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content and Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences. People literally misses out to focus on the later one.
Also, I highly recommend on using those tools that automatically re-share your most engaged content.
Great thoughts Jen, by the way!
What a lovely comment, Himani -- thank you! I can 100% relate to your experience re: a post you're really proud of can racking up tons of social engagement, but hardly any actual views or click-throughs. Such a bummer for any writer! I'm very happy that you found these tips helpful, though. Practicing a "social shakeup" in particular is such a worthwhile strategy to test out, especially once you've determined where your audience is most engaged with you on social media.
And, as you might imagine, I'm pretty fond of using automation to share our best-performing evergreen content with more people, too. :) Thanks again for the comment!
Hi Himani Kankaria
I've been had the same problem in the past, and at least in my case the re-sharing content does not worked mainly on facebook on the other hand works very well on linkedin and in email (infusionsoft)
Great article, thanks! There is this Wordpress plugin "Title Experiment Free" that allows you to split test post titles. You can use different post titles to see which one performs best with your audience. I hope it helps.
Really interesting plugin Mostafa, thank you for that. I was worried by the impact on SEO of this plugin but the FAQ says there's no problem:
During the period when your experiments are running, search engines will be shown the first title of your post (though, this setting is configurable). Once you stop the experiment for your post, everything will go back to normal.
Have you experimented with it? Can you confirm there's no impact on SEO?
Thank you again! :)
I'm not sure man! I stumbled upon it on Matthewwoodward.co.uk -- can't even find it now :) If they say that only the first title is submitted to the search engines, it's okay I guess. But don't they show us the click-through-rate for each title in the search results?
Please let me know if you made sure it doesn't have any negative effect on SEO. Thanks Angel.
Jen, great information in this article. I think many (content strategists) have challenges in re-gurgitating a 3K word content for social platform such as Instagram and Facebook (twitter).
To re-share is more than just dropping a link to the source.
Many content marketers forget is that each social platform is where the audience live on. There are people that are on Instagram & Facebook that will read the content there versus having to go to the source. Content distribution may be a different subject.
Its probably the reason why Buzzfeed is a big player in producing portable content that can be produced on any social platform.
Amazing points!! Writing for audiences who live on a variety of platforms can be tricky! But doing so gives you chances to tweak and repurpose content (including the language of a social post) for each audience, and that alone can really help engagement across all platforms. Thanks for the comment!
Some clients aren't so keen on resharing or curating old posts. They think it is duplicate content and will be bad for their SEO. I understand their concern but they are missing so much... Next time I hear complaints like that, I will show them your article! Thanks for sharing,
Thanks for reading, Fanny! Hope this article can help you out with clients that need a little convincing. Responsible resharing ftw! :)
Great post Jen - I think copywriting social media promotions is as important as the original piece to drive engagement. Using social management tools to re-schedule saves time and since there is so much stuff out there, I find its important to re-share at different times of the day to reach a wider audience.
Thank you for reading, Rachel! One of the biggest lessons I had to learn as a writer was that writing thoughtful social media promo copy was as important of a skill as conversion copywriting for a landing page, or even writing up a well-researched 2000-word article. As jhines touched on in a comment above, many people don't ever click off their social platform of choice to read a post -- unless the description is really enticing -- so writing promo copy that gets the click-through is huge!
You also make an excellent point about resharing at different times of day to hit different audiences. Heck, I notice the immediate difference in my social feeds just by going from west coast to east coast! If writers and marketers aren't accounting for the social media habits of their entire audience, they're definitely missing out on a ton of potential engagement. :)
Personally this tactics depends on my goals.
If I'm working on a blog which is affiliate site I usually create less than 100 post all related between them, and then start to update and optimize each post regularly (new images, more secctions, videos and so on). If is some personal blog I preffer dont do it.
For sure. It definitely all depends on where you prefer to prioritize your time. Optimizing and resharing posts for an affiliate site probably saves you a ton of time, and exposes your posts to new readers/readers who may have missed them. Thanks for sharing!
I'm finally starting to do this but still need to practice. I just started yesterday with an article I published in The Diplomat Magazine a year ago (not to generate leads or anything, just 'cuz it was my first article in a major publication - YEY).
But your advice about "Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus" is great. I never thought of that but will keep it in mind.
It's definitely a change in thought process for a lot of writers. It's easy to feel like we're supposed to be cranking out new content all the time. Happy this article was helpful - thanks for reading it! :)
You're welcome. And yeah, I totally agree with you about how writers feel like they have to crank out new content all the time.
As grandes marcas são um laboratório de aprendizagem para quem deseja verificar o que está funcionado antes mesmo de colocar em pratica
Não falo português, mas quero agradecer muito por ler!
Some content that works fine every year includes the "best whatever in 2017" You can share new strategies or whatever new or important for your area. In sector like marketing or web design everybody wants to be updated so this content will be shareable and useful for many people.
Excellent post Jen!!
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Thank you for reading, Javier!
Makes sense, if you consider using the Skyscraper Technique on other peoples work, then you should really be looking internally and using it on your old work too :)
100% agreed! It's amazing what a little TLC on a top-ranked post (and some awesome email outreach) can do for site traffic! Thanks for the comment. :)
Write something fresh index, see the results, and after a time, improve your article.Thats the for efficient way of rise your ranks.
I used to do something similar to this. I would copy someones blog exactly the same as what they did and put in the bottom of the page that the blog was not created by me and then link out to the person who created it with a brand link as well as linking to the blog post i got it from. This would massively boost up both pages.
You are increasing theres because there post is that good and correct you are wanting to use it, but also you are making sure that everyone sees the blog post to help them out. People may say that this is duplicate content, well they are wrong. Googles algorythm could pick up that we was linking to where the content was copied from and they just pushed the website up even more.
Are you saying that your site got "pushed up" when you copied content directly from other sites? Or their site got "pushed up"?
Both of them got pushed up the SERP, just make sure that you link to them with a brand link and a exact match link to there blog post. This will be saying that the blog post is not yours but it is there's (who ever you got it off). This tell Google you are just promoting a blog post. Trust me this works but don't abuse it, maybe once every couple of months maybe once every 3/4. Because otherwise you will probably get peanalised.
Also in the mean time of waiting to do your next "copied" blog post you need to write some manual ones and just make sure everything is interlinked.
Hmmm this doesn't sound like a good idea to me...
I would be giving them credit with a canonical tag, as well as the link.
Your tactic may work in the short-term until G figures out who was the original source of the content, but I don't think you will achieve long-term rankings by doing this.
Think you have miss understood, I said you give them a homepage brand link as well as a link to there blog. It is a legit way of SEO because you are prmoting someone elses brand.
can you share some examples, I like your idea
This is great! I have hundreds of published blog posts and have been struggling to come up with new topics. Have been looking for ways to re-use.
Wow, you've got a virtual goldmine of content! I'd automate the resharing of your posts that get the best organic traffic ASAP! :)
I've never been doing that. I guess I need to start soon after reading the blog post. Great article. Cheers, Martin
Very Interesting blogpost, I like it.
Thanks for the great post Jen. I understand the need to market your content to give it exposure and milk it's potential.
However, I have a couple of questions I am hoping you might be able to shed some light on.
1. Does resharing work best on specific platforms? The reason I ask is that Michael Stelzner in an Unemployable podcast said that there wasn't much point in resharing on Twitter given their algorithms.
2. Most platforms are probably smart enough to detect (via the links you share), where you are sending people even if you share various angles around the same blog post. In which case would you actually be harming your reach (organic or otherwise)?
Thank you so much for reading, and thank you for the great questions! Apologies for the delay - I've been traveling. :)
1. It's all about where your potential audience/fans/customer base are most active. More than anything, though, it's about quality. If you have quality evergreen content to reshare consistently, that helps build brand awareness AND it frees you up to have even more authentic, real-time conversations on social media.
2. Varying your social posts is super important. There's nothing wrong with testing out different social post variations (see Tip #3) for the same content (like a blog post) to see what resonates more with your audience. Given people's fractured attention spans across all social platforms, there's really no harm in resharing a blog post multiple times via social media -- especially given that the odds of someone seeing it every single time you post it are so small! There's obviously a line between resharing and spamming, which is why we're huge fans of using social media schedulers to automatically schedule and shuffle your evergreen content. Thanks again for the questions!
Your ideas are quite useful and have sense. Their usage can actually change the situation and improve it significantly. There is a plenty of content which is underrated, although it is useful and interesting. In such a way it is possible to share important ideas with more people.
Thank you for reading!
Yes absolutely right we should Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content fro blog. Thanks for your article
Thank you for reading it! :)
Very interesting article. Despite the subject is well known to me, point 3 gave me some new ideas.
Regards
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Thanks so much! It was fun to write and to contribute here. :)
You said right responsible resharing content is important part of content marketing, Reshare your content with new look with attractive and catchy line, it's give more impact to your content..
Couldn't agree more! Most of the content we write isn't seeing its full potential; resharing (not spamming) is truly an underrated and awesome way to do more with the all the hard work of writing, researching, and editing quality content. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!