Doing something just because other people are doing it can get you in trouble.
(Especially when it comes to your fashion choices.)
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Sometimes, though, you’ve gotta stop and consider why they’re doing what they’re doing. When you understand their reasons, it might turn out that their strategy makes a lot of sense!
When it comes to social media marketing, one strategy that gets more and more popular with time is repeating your content – and with good reason.
The majority of marketers plan their social media content at least a day in advance, and 25% of them plan it a month or more ahead of time. When you’re planning ahead and putting so much time and energy into creating killer updates, it only makes sense to share them more than once and increase the value of each one – which is why major brand names are doing exactly that.
(Why don’t most people notice? We’ll explain in a sec.)
If the thought of posting the same update multiple times feels too much like scribbling a cheat sheet on the palm of your hand before a big test, this post is for you – let’s take a closer look at just a few of the brands on social who are doing it, and why!
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Reaching (and testing with) different audiences
When you publish a new blog post, its traffic tends to drop really, really quickly – and that makes promoting it more than once pretty important.
Just look at how Darren Rowse from ProBlogger promotes a new post:
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Same image, same text, same link – this is the same exact tweet sent six times over the course of six days.
Notice anything?
There’s engagement on every one of these, because every time it gets posted, it gets seen by different people – people who missed it the other times, and might never have seen it at all if he hadn’t shared it more than once.
Fewer than half of all Twitter users check the site even just once per day, so posting the same update once per day isn’t too unusual. In this case, it might even provide some valuable insights as to the best times to post – by sharing a tweet at different times on different days, you can look for trends in your impressions and engagements.
You might be surprised by the times that end up being most popular – here’s an example.
Take a look at Social Media Examiner’s Twitter account over a period of about 30 hours:
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Your eyes aren’t playing tricks – for more than a day, they posted the same promo copy with the same image and the same link over and over, and nothing else.
On paper, that might sound a little too broken record-y, but when you take a closer look at how they did it and what the results were, it makes a LOT of sense.
By spacing out their updates, they were able to hit a wide range of followers – and it paid off.
Social Media Examiner promoted the same post five times over the course of a day and a half, but those promos were all shared several hours apart – including at times you might not expect many users to be online.
For example, one of these tweets was published at 6:05 AM Eastern – and it got the most retweets out of all five. Another was posted at 2:05 AM – it got the second highest number of retweets.
Experiment with your audience by posting the same thing at drastically different times, including times when you don’t necessarily expect it to succeed. You might learn that thanks to time zone differences (and caffeine, probably), your updates have a lot of potential around the clock!
Making the most of your evergreen content
Sitting on a goldmine of evergreen blog posts that aren’t getting the traffic they deserve?
Sharing those posts again and again – like BuzzFeed does – makes sure they don’t go to waste.
(Side note: here are some tips on coming up with more ideas for evergreen posts.)
BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.
After all, they publish somewhere in the vicinity of 10 gazillion posts per day. They’re not exactly hurting for content to share, and if they wanted, they could do the bare minimum by promoting each thing once and moving on.
But instead, they do this:
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When BuzzFeed has evergreen posts – or even evergreen-ish ones – they share them on social more than once. In the cases above, they shared the same updates again three days after sharing them the first time, and they performed almost exactly the same.
With just a few clicks, BuzzFeed made each of those posts double in value.
(Wouldn’t you like to do the same with YOUR content? Heck, that’s why we built a tool that automatically re-shares your updates for you!)
Whether you’re sharing something again just a few days later, a few weeks later, or a few months later, it can make a big difference!
Getting the word out
Evergreen posts are useful, but not everything you write has to have a shelf life of forever. Even updates promoting timely news benefit from being repeated.
Take a look at The New York Times:
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The Times makes its name as a resource for timely news – but a piece of news stays relevant for more than a few minutes. Their Twitter profile frequently repeats itself, so that their latest articles get as much attention as possible while they’re timely!
Even entertainment sites like MTV News do the same:
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Are any of those tweets going to be relevant forever? Absolutely not – but while they are, they’re worth being shared multiple times, and racking up dozens (or hundreds) of interactions each time!
Who else have you noticed doing it?
It’s easy to not notice when someone shares the same update over and over – even if they’re a huge brand!
Have you jumped on board with this strategy yourself? Have you noticed that it’s becoming more popular? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
The post Five Big Brands’ Strategies for Recycling Social Media Updates appeared first on MeetEdgar Blog.