Repurposing Content Roundup

Repurposing Content Roundup: How to Use Your Content Sawdust

As online content makers, we all put a ton of work into the content that we create. That work takes time. And unless you’re some 5th dimension alien being that has no problem traveling in the 4th dimension (which is time), then you probably don’t have the minutes in a day to make new piece after new piece of content for each platform you’re on.

However, that’s not too say you should just throw one piece out there, forget about it and move on to the next. On the other hand, it also doesn’t mean that you should go out there and post “20 posts on Facebook a day”.

There is a happy medium between making one post and moving on to the next (which is highly ineffective) to repeatedly saying “Hey everyone! Check this out!” 10+ times a day (which is another highly ineffective way to get your message out there).

What’s a way to produce that content in a way that isn’t overwhelming? And what’s the correct amount?

Content “Sawdust”

In a video that came out last week, Gary Vaynerchuck dropped this word to describe macro-content. While I had heard of his strategy from Brendon Burchard, in how he uses quotes for Instagram and Facebook, I hadn’t really thought about applying it to anything else than that platform.

Essentially content sawdust is little snippets from the main content. As Gary said, when people think of .gif pictures, that is a form of sawdust. When you see a trailer for a movie, that consists of sawdust. Heck, you might even be able to think of sawdust as that thing that Paul Harvey used to do before he did his Midday NEWS or The Rest of the Story.

(Speaking of Paul Harvey, Mike Rowe – yes, from Dirty Jobs – is starting a new podcast that Paul Harvey was an inspiration for. Check that out here!)

Know Thy Platform

Before you go posting content sawdust, you need to know how to work the platform that you’re posting that sawdust on.

For example, the topic of this post came to me last week from one of my favorite Facebook Groups: The Expert Community. If you don’t know about Facebook Groups and how they’re helping online business in 2016, then you have a few things to learn about how Facebook currently works.

In the old days, before Pages, Groups were the place where people could come together and discuss things that they had an interest in. I know that when I was going to Purdue, that I made several off the wall ones. So did some of my friends.

One of the ones that I was proudest of was called the 10/22 Club. It started of as a club at Purdue who members had their birthday on October 22nd. Very elitist, right? Haha.

Back then, you could search for people by birthday. And, if I recall correctly, I had 25 members at one point. However, by this point, it had grown beyond Purdue itself.

Eventually, Pages did come into the picture, and when they did – groups essentially stopped having a purpose. If you had a Page, you could essentially create a profile for an organization, game, or anything else that wasn’t just one person. Dogs, cats, birthday clubs… you name it.

Just like you can on your own wall, a Page could post something and people who liked that page would see it on their feeds. Groups never had the ability to really do this.

Technically, that’s still the way Pages work. Unfortunately for us business owners, things changed again about 2 years ago. To get more than 10% of your followers to see what you posted on a Page, you have to pay for it – regardless of what the Page is being used for. I call this the Page Pay to Play. It’s very one direction.

In retaliation(?) to this, groups started making a comeback. However, instead of just passively posting things on your page wall, with groups, you have to pay attention to the rules of the group. Many don’t support posts to external links. They fear that the use of external links will drive people away from the group. A greedy owner of the group might see this as a threat.

Personally, I feel the more the merrier. As long as posts are relevant to the group and are offering free value to the members – it’s a great thing to do. However, if spam starts entering then, you might just have to draw some lines. Simply come up some rules in which the community has to follow. That’s why big groups with 1000+ members often have themes and rules when it comes to what’s going on each day.

Another thing about groups is that you actually have to engage and become connected to the people in the group. To do this well, I think you really have to think of it more as a community and not so much of an authority page.

That said, I think Facebook has become community driven. You just have to be willing to friend up to the max of 5000 people if you want it to work that way for you. Otherwise, go with the Page Pay to Play method.

That all being said, you’ll have to figure out how to use the platform that you want to connect with your audiences on. Do you use Instagram? What works over there? Do you use Snapchat? How does that work? Periscope? Again – figure out the best way to package the sawdust to those audiences.

If you want some specific examples of how you can package sawdust from your blog posts, specifically, you can check out Pat’s examples here.

Correct Amount to Post

If you feel I haven’t answered this part indirectly already, then I’ll go ahead an answer it directly here. The correct amount to post is… ::drumroll::

…up to you.

Brendon posts 4 times a day. He uses 2 posts that he made that morning. I’ve seen him do 2 images on Instagram and 2 on Facebook. Specifically he says his times are 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm for those posts. He posts many of his YouTube videos on Sunday (who does that?).

Pat posts several times a day. I wasn’t able to pin down exactly other than a 9am post, a midday post, and an after work post. Generally speaking he does a good job of posting on the weekends a couple of times. However, when he’s traveling – he kinda goes through all the platforms. On his trip to the Food Blogger Conference in Salt Lake City this past weekend, he ended up Instagramming a pic of his luggage during the day. Then later, he did a ‘scope and then a couple of Facebook Live posts in the evening. As well as saying thanks to the people he had dinner with and the tours he got though the rest of the weekend.

Gary posts… well, I haven’t been able to pin it down yet. But I’m assuming it’s similar – AND he has a guy shadowing him for DailyVee. So, it’s not necessarily a one man band. If you’re really interested in when his accounts post (or anyone) – make an account on IFTTT and create a recipe that monitors certain accounts and posts the message on a spreadsheet. Then from there you can see patterns after a week of monitoring.

Action Steps:

So this week, as you’re creating your new epic posts. I want you to start going through some of the work you’ve already done. See if there’s anything in there that you might be able to say to yourself “man, that was good!”. Quote it and repackage it.

So many people don’t reuse the evergreen content they have. If you’re on a budget (like me) use what’s free and what you can afford to spend. If you have some extra funds to try some other stuff, get a subscription to Edgar or something similar. Spend some time coming up with a daily and monthly plan of how you can line up content. Make themed weeks. If that goes well, start doing themed months!

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