This post is one of a series on my content production system, developed over 10 years and designed to scale content end-to-end in 6 months as an acquisition channel.
Here are the other posts in the series:
- Why the winner takes all in Content Marketing
- What everyone gets wrong about Content Strategy
- Building Your Keyword Universe
- Minimum Viable Technical SEO Audit
- Recruiting good Freelance Writers
- How to write blog content at scale
- Growth engineering for SEO
- Link building for authority
- Content Repurposing for Social Promotion (this post)
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Most businesses spend all their time and money creating content, and almost none of their time promoting it. Internal targets are set based on publishing cadence – 3 new blog posts, 1 new podcast, 5 new videos – so you hit publish and pray the algorithm is in your favor.
You’ve done all the hard work to create it, so why not repurpose that content into social media posts to promote it? The truth is that it’s hard enough to finish a good piece of content. Half the time you’re not even sure how the piece will turn out. Now that it’s done you just want to take a break and move on, not stress about how to make it ‘go viral’ on social media. However the benefits of repurposing your video, text, and audio content are massive. I’ve seen even posts get thousands more visitors, sometimes on the fourth or fifth time we posted.
Most of the difficulty in producing quality content is in coming up with interesting ideas, researching the topic deeply, and developing a unique opinion on it: an investment sometimes totalling thousands of dollars. As Derek Halpern says “It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more”. Finding a way to generate multiple assets from each piece of content is key to making the economics work.
As Joel Klettke from Case Study Buddy describes it, you can turn one core asset into a whole campaign with "progressively deeper assets suited to difference 'appetites' of your leads, prospects, and clients."
To illustrate an example of how this can be done in practice, I’ll take the example of a video tutorial for Vexpower, an online marketing training business I co-founded.
Video Transcription
The key to working with video is to transcribe it. Once it’s in text format you can much more easily turn the video into various pieces of content. I use Loom to record my videos, so I get a nice transcript of the video automatically, though I’ve had success with tools like Descript in the past, as well as the various cloud transcription APIs if you’re doing this programmatically.
Quote Extraction
Now that you have a transcript, you have something you can work with. Text is the universal format of communication between humans, but also computers. We can either comb through the transcript ourselves for interesting quotes, or ask an AI model like GPT-3 to highlight some for us. This method isn’t foolproof, and it takes some work iterating to get the prompt exactly right, and reliable across a wide variety of content formats.
This is where you see the value of a good transcription service: the second quote down got things slightly wrong. Once you have clean highlighted quotes can then be used to clip the video at those specific timestamps. With video clips you can post them to Twitter, or TikTok, or upload them to Youtube Shorts, which most people don’t realize is already generating billions of daily views. It’s possible to overlay text on the videos as well as change the text in the post copy or video description. For this you could use GPT-3 again to summarize the quote.
This isn’t ready to post as of yet, so we could pass this idea to our social media team to rewrite. However we could actually rely on GPT-3 again to tidy up the response, in effect using GPT-3 to fix its own work! Note that AI responses are not deterministic, so while some responses are genuinely amazing, you don’t get reliable responses every time, and it can help to have a human in the loop, or multiple layers of testing and evaluation of your prompts.
From one video you can create multiple social media posts to space out over the next few weeks or months, and you can do that for every new video you create. Now that you have the transcript however you can repurpose it in other ways. For example with some editing it can be turned into a blog post, a presentation to post on Slideshare, or a long form essay posted to LinkedIn or Medium. Once you start repurposing content, it’ll change the way you create content: you’ll start thinking about promotion from the beginning, and new opportunities to repurpose content into different platforms will present themselves.
We're working on a tool to do all this automatically for you. If you'd like to test out the Alpha version, you can sign up here: usebuffalo.com
