You’re spending precious time and effort crafting your content, but when it’s shared on social media, the engagement isn’t there.
“Oh well,” you think to yourself.
It’s easy to shrug it off and move onto planning the next piece, but your writing deserves a second chance to shine.
Sharing it once on social media means nothing as it’s easy for your content to get lost in the huge world of the internet. Blogs can easily go unnoticed, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth sharing.
For real results, it needs to be republished. If you’re serious about internet marketing and writing content – you need to be serious about driving it, too! Why?
Grasping the art of repeating social media posts is the key to growing reach, engagement, traffic, leads, and, ultimately, sales. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to re-share content and you don’t want to upset or push away your followers.
Want to find out how? Read on to discover how often to post on social media – the right way.
1. Is It OK to Share Content More Than Once?
The first question you may ask is – is it OK to share content more than once?
Yes, some marketers shy away from re-sharing content out of fear that it will annoy their followers and lead them to unfollow.
But the reality is that given how expansive the world wide web is, it’s unlikely your followers will see a duplicate post. They aren’t online 24 hours a day and when they are, they can miss posts due to low organic reach or increased competition.
The high likelihood of increased reach by far outweighs the low chance of overlap.
If a repeated post does appear on their feed, your followers are unlikely to notice or care – especially on high-volume networks such as Twitter. In fact, on Twitter, the number of followers who see your tweets may be as little as 2%.
It’s easy to forget within marketing that people don’t always notice every single thing we do!
Sharing content more than once provides followers with value as it allows them more opportunity to read quality content produced with their interests in mind.
So, instead of worrying about whether you’ll irritate people with duplicate content, you should worry if your content’s reaching the right people at all.
2. How Do I Avoid Being a Spammer?
Nobody wants to spam social media. Here’s where you need to be careful when re-posting.
If you post the same link with the same message every hour, you’ll agitate even the most tolerant of followers. Re-posting this way is a no go and if you share too often, people will start to phase out your posts or unfollow.
Use your common sense and think of your own behaviors and the way you use social media yourself.
How often would you consider too often? How would you react if you saw someone else using the same strategy? Where is the ‘spam line’ for you?
Ask yourself all these questions and put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Be careful not to cross that metaphorical line!
Respect your followers and take them into consideration. After all, your feed tailors to them, not you.
Likewise, share content that you believe is well-written and of quality value. Content that your followers will genuinely enjoy and find useful.
There’s no point scheduling a post across weeks if you believe it to be weak or dreary.
3. What Types of Social Media Posts Should I Republish?
Luckily, most types of posts can be re-posted to drive social media traffic.
The main aspect is that all links in the post are relevant. There’s nothing more annoying than clicking on a link in an article only to find that the article is out of date or that the link is broken.
A good idea before re-posting content is to double-check links and fact-check the article.
There are some types of content that work particularly well to re-post. These include:
- Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is timeless and always relevant. These are the pieces that people will click on time after time – it doesn’t matter how long ago it was posted.
- Regular Promotions and Events
Posting of regular promotions or events coming up within your business is a great way to keep followers in the loop. What’s more – people are usually grateful to be informed of offers and deals where they can save money or grab a bargain. This is especially when they can easily miss them on the feed.
- Popular Posts
Popular posts are popular for a reason – because they provide value to your readers. Re-posting these pieces allows more people to reach your best content, leading to engagement through the rest of your website.
Who knows, maybe it’ll go viral!
- Content for Different Time Zones
If your post is valuable to readers over the globe, re-posting it throughout different times of the day is a great way to ensure different countries are reached. Plus, it means that any overlap is unlikely.
- Big News
There may be a short lead time for big news stories, but if it’s important then people will want to hear. Schedule it throughout different times of the following days or even weeks, depending on the nature of the story.
4. How Should I Share My Re-Posts?
As we've touch base on, there are ways to re-post on social media with best practice. Such as:
- Never Share the Same Message Twice
Posting the same link with the exact same messaging, as we know, makes you a spammer. And we don’t want to be a spammer, do we?
Using a different variety of messaging for your posts is an important step in the re-posting process. There are many ways to share a blog post – so get creative!
An easy option is to post the title and link with some relating hashtags. This is simple but works well with an eye-catching title.
Another straightforward way to mix it up is to ask your followers a question relating to the post or to pull an interesting snippet of text from the blog to tease and draw in clicks. Likewise, adding facts featured in the main text is a great way to arouse attention.
Get creative and have fun with your ideas! Monitor which types of messaging generate the most interest for future reference. Make sure every message is unique in its own way!
Don’t slack on changing imagery either. Remember that browsers skim through a feed – it’s the supporting image of a post that first catches the eye. If it’s the same old photo used with every post, the reader is going to get bored, even if the messaging is different.
- Make a Schedule
Decide how many times you’re going to re-share your post and schedule it in. Depending on the piece, it can be shared weeks or months after it’s first published.
Just remember to be careful with your timings – again, don’t be a spammer! Don’t share them too closely together, or in big clumps. Leave a fair amount of time between each post.
Decide which social media networks you’d like to share on and how frequently on each.
With a high-turnover network like Twitter, you can get away with posting more regularly than on Facebook, for example.
Whilst you could go as far as posting daily on Twitter, with Facebook we’d suggest posting weekly at the most. It’s a personal choice but be sure not to over-do it.
With Instagram posting once is enough to promote a blog post – it certainly isn’t the network to republish the same content.
Use a standout image with a note in the text directing the viewer to visit the blog piece, found on your Instagram bio. This is the only place on Instagram where you can share a clickable link.
If your followers are global, you can get away with posting more as the risk of overlap is low. Consider repeating your posts a couple of times throughout the day – but always have a good chunk of hours between them.
Improving Your Internet Marketing Techniques
With the right methods, you’ll learn how to use social media effectively and how to republish posts with best practice.
Done the right way, re-posting can offer more engagement, clicks, traffic, and sales and can draw in new followers. There’s also the added excitement of content potentially going viral! It’s not unusual for pieces to generate attention months after publication.
Keen to develop your internet marketing skills even further? Check out our range of products or get in touch with any questions.
