Everything You Need to Know About Repeating Social Media Content
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Our users love how Edgar simplifies repeating social media content, but we still get a lot of questions about this powerful strategy. Many content marketers wonder:
"Isn't it bad to repeat content on social media?"
"I don't want to sound spammy!"
"Will platforms like Instagram penalize me for repeating posts?"Repeating social media content is one of the core pieces of a successful social media strategy but we hear many questions about this tactic. But we're here to clear up all your concerns! True is that whether you're posting on Instagram, Facebook, or any platform, repeating your best-performing content can significantly boost your visibility and engagement.
What? You still have more questions? Alright, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about repeating social media content.
Why should you repeat social media content?
First things first: repeating social media content is not bad, lazy or a “hack.” It’s an important part of a social strategy because your audience deserves to see your content. If you’re only posting your message once, then your audience is probably missing out on seeing your messages!
Social media is a crowded, busy place. Your post doesn’t spend as much time in front of your audience as you think it does. The lifespan of a Facebook post is about 105 minutes, an Instagram post is 20 hours and a tweet is around 24 minutes.
If you’re only posting once then you’re playing against the odds that the majority of your audience is seeing your content. People are busy. They aren’t on social media all day, every day.
Also, consider how your audience is growing. Are you picking up more followers every week and month? Could they get value out of your older original posts? Of course, they can! But if you are only sharing your content one time, then your new audience won’t ever get the chance to see it unless they go digging into your archive and history and most people just aren’t going to do that. You have to show it to them, which means repeating it!
Here’s an example from our own content library. We sent a social media status update promoting a webinar twice. It received 127 link clicks. You can see there was a big jump the second time we posted that link on March 26th. If we had only posted the link once, we would have only received 26 clicks!
What should I repeat on social media?
If you’re not sure what you should repeat on social media, ask yourself this: is my post still valuable? Certain posts are evergreen content, which is content that is still valuable and relevant months or years after it has been published. If something is still valuable to your audience, then you should be re-sharing it! Don’t let your best content get buried.
If you are unfamiliar with evergreen content or you want to create more of it, check out this guide to creating an evergreen content strategy.
How often should you repeat social media content?
There is no specific schedule we recommend for repeating social media content but there are some steps you can take to make sure you don’t sound repetitive.
First, you need to make sure that there are other posts shared between your repeated content. When you repeat social media posts, you need a balanced calendar and to be sharing enough content in between repeated content so you don’t sound repetitive.
We recommend using a category-based scheduling system to balance out your social media feeds. You don’t want to be the person at the party talking only about yourself and you don’t want to be the person on social media only talking about your product or service. That’s why you need categories. You can create a category-based system by breaking up your posts into different core topics or types of content.
Here are some examples of popular categories:
- Blog posts
- Motivational quotes
- Behind the scenes posts
- Industry news
- Curated content from other publications
- User-generated content
- Seasonal/holiday posts
- Promotions
- Video Tutorials
These are just a few examples. Your categories depend on your business and more importantly, your audience. Ask your audience what types of content they’d prefer to see from you or look at your past social media posts to see which topics were most popular.
Once you set your categories, you can create your schedule. Let’s say your schedule looks something like this:
| Day | Category |
|---|---|
| Monday | Blog Posts |
| Tuesday | Promotional Offer |
| Wednesday | User Testimonial |
| Thursday | Curated Content |
| Friday | Blog Posts |
| Saturday | Promotional Offer |
| Sunday | User Testimonial |
| Monday | Motivational Quote |
| Tuesday | Behind the Scenes |
| Wednesday |
