Our users love that Edgar makes it easy for repeating social media content but we still hear many questions about this tactic. We decided it’s time to spill the beans on how, why and when you should repeat social media content.
“Isn’t it bad to repeat social media?”
“I don’t want to sound spammy!”
“Don’t social media platforms decrease your reach if you repost content?”
Repeating social media content is one of the core pieces of a successful social media strategy but we hear many questions about this tactic. So we’re here to answer all your questions about repeating social media content and here they are:
No.
You won’t.
Not at all.
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 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!
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:
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog Posts | Promotional Offer | User Testimonial | Curated Content | Blog Posts | Promotional Offer | User Testimonial |
| Motivational Quote | Behind the scenes | Motivational Quote |
As you can see, even if you are repeating content, it won’t be posting back to back because you’ve balanced out your calendar with categories!
How to Repeat Posts Without Being Repetitive
So still feeling a little wary about repeating social media content? Allow us to introduce your new best social media friend: variations. Variations are different ways of saying the same thing. They get the same message across but in different ways.
There are lots of different ways you can create variations of the same post. We’ll show you using a recent blog post we published last week.
Keeping it simple with just the title:
Asking a question:
Switching up media:
Asking the audience a question:
Using a quote:
Pretty easy, right? As an added bonus, you can use variations to test out phrases and imagery to see what actually gets your audience clicking!
Variations keep you in line with Twitter’s/X Terms of Service. Since 2018, Twitter stopped allowing users to post identical tweets which means you can’t technically repeat social media content on Twitter. That’s why you need variations. You don’t have to keep creating tons of new content or post less. You can simply rephrase, reword and rework your posts into multiple variations.
[Pssst! Edgar has a super cool tool that suggests variations for you based on the link you share. Want to see it in action? Try our Suggested Variation tool for free here.]
Will the algorithm restrict my reach if I’m repeating content?
We want to clear this up because it’s a huge misconception that repeating social media posts will hurt your reach. If your content is engaging content, then your reach won’t decline. Social media platforms want their users active. If your content continues to get reactions, likes, comments, and shares, then your reach will continue to grow.
Repeating social media content saves you time and we recommend using some of that extra time to engage with your audience and be active on a platform. Engagement is the key to keep reach high so keep engaging with your audience to keep reaching them.
To sum it up:
Repeating social media posts does not have to be spammy. It won’t hurt your reach or annoy your audience. Structure your schedule correctly and experiment with variations and you’ll see your traffic, engagement, and followers increase.
Repeating social media content is just one of the tactics of a successful social media strategy.
