How to repurpose video content for social media

It’s no secret that online video is starting to come into its own. But producing video content can be expensive, so you’re going to want to make the most of that video. The absolute best way to save yourself time and money in your video marketing activity is to repurpose video content for social media. Here’s how.

These days, if you want to truly stand out, you need to be telling better stories, more effective stories, and more attention grabbing stories – and using video on your social media channels is increasingly becoming one of the most effective ways to do this.

Obviously, not every organisation has an in-house video production team or can afford to constantly create new video content. Budget constraints are a huge factor for any content marketing campaign.

The absolute best way to save yourself money (and time) is to repurpose and recycle the existing arsenal of video in your content archives.

How to repurpose video content for social media

What is ‘repurposing content’?

To start off with, you’ll want to get more familiar with the concept of ‘repurposing content’ in general.

Repurposing content is simply reusing and adapting existing content into different formats for different marketing channels, allowing you to target your audiences again in different ways, or to target a new audience on different platforms.

repurpose video content

Some example of ‘repurposing content’:

• Breathing new life into blog posts by turning them into podcasts
• Turning presentation slides into Pinterest infographics
• Turning instructional graphics into GIFs.

Long story short, it means re-using that content for something different than it’s original intended use – and it means you need to think creatively and outside the box.

Start thinking about repurposing  from the very beginning – it’s not about creating a single-use piece of content:

“You’re not creating a blog post, a video, or a white paper … you are telling a story. That story can be told in a myriad of ways to help extend your content marketing strategy.” – Robert Rose, CMI

For more background to repurposing content, Buffer has written a great guide to repurposing contentand Search EngineJournal has written a brilliant post on effective ways to repurpose your blog content for social media.

Why should you repurpose video content?

Taking existing content and reusing it elsewhere may sound like hard work, especially if you’ve already spent a long time creating that original content in the first place.

“Every content idea involves a story you are trying to tell. If you remember that the story can and should always be told in many different ways, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.”

There are a number of other advantages to repurposing video content:

1. Get an SEO boost: Multiple pieces of content around the same topic can generate additional opportunities to target a desired keyword.
2. Reach a new audience: In many cases, your original piece of content may have only made a splash with one group of customers. Repurposing the content for different mediums allows you to meet an audience where they are.
3. Reinforce your message: Repetition can be an essential part of sending a message that sinks in. Marketing’s Rule of 7 states that buyers need to hear your message seven times before they’ll close the deal.
4. Gain extra authority: Publishing quality content in a variety of places on a single topic can teach others to regard you as an expert.
5. Save time: Rather than creating new content from scratch, you may get the results you’re looking for from reusing your existent content in new ways

How can I repurpose video content?

The simplest way of repurposing video content is to take your current videos and slice ‘em up!

A video that is several minutes long won’t play as well on social platforms where brevity is king. Think about the videos you’ve already created.

• Are there any longer videos that you could slice up into shorter 15 or 30-second clips?  
• Can you succinctly help illustrate your brand or campaign story by taking a small piece of a longer video and sharing it on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook?

You’ll need to bear in mind which length works best on each platform when you edit your longer clips down – including best length and audio format. This guide to video best practice across seven different social video platforms will be helpful.

Luckily, the short amount of time it takes to slice up and create these shorter clips will increase your ROI for the production of the original content and enhance and broaden the reach of the key message.

How can I get more video views across social media?

Have you created a video that only lives on YouTube or Vimeo? Have you taken the time to properly promote?

Make sure you’re posting it in different formats across your social presence, if appropriate.

This post from the Content Marketing Insititute explains how to take one video and turn it into 8 different assets across YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, WordPress, and more.

For example, here’s how Jay Baer, who publishes a three-minute video show called Jay Today, repurposes his video content:

“For each Jay Today episode that has been transcribed, my team and I rework the headline and copy three different ways, and post the video and written content as a blog post on Linkedin, Medium, and on [our website], where I take the best episode of the prior week and rewrite it every Wednesday.”

How can archive video be used on social media?

Digging through your outtakes can unearth a whole wealth of new video content.

If you’ve commissioned video content in the past, you’ll know that the final edit of a 2-3 minute long clip will have only used 10% of the actual footage that was filmed.

Take a look through the outtakes and the unused video that you have in your arsenal.

Can you take 15-30 seconds of team outtakes along with some quick title overlay to help tell a story or promote something on Instagram or Twitter?

Or if you’ve got a video longer than 30 seconds, find out how to upload longer videos to Twitter.

How can audio from videos be used?

Audio can be just as powerful as video.

If anyone in your organisations has done interviews, podcasts or any other audio content, that can be used to create short video clips as well.

Remember: the most powerful and shareable content on social media is succinct, and it won’t take very long to add to some creative title overlay to a 15-second piece of audio.

You can illustrate your social media post and bring-to-life with a great audio quote, without it costing a fortune.

Looking for support in repurposing video content for social media?

Empower regularly works with clients on creative content production, including campaign strategy for Snapchat, Facebook Live, YouTube and other social video platforms.

Contact us for more information and subscribe to the Empower Moments so you don’t miss it next time!