“Hey, Remember me?” - Evergreen Content

What’s next?
If you’re like me in the world of social media, you’re feeling the pressure of “what’s next” multiple times a day. If you’re overwhelmed about creating new content ALL THE TIME, you’re not alone. Content creators are on the hook for providing new content day in and day out.

While chatting with other creators, it seems like many of us forgot about the magical world of “evergreen content” in the last couple of years.

Evergreen Content
For those who haven’t heard this term before, Evergreen Content is content that doesn’t age quickly. You can use it and re-use it again and again. It’ll keep working for you.

If you gasped and thought to yourself “What! Re-use content! That will look horrible to our audience!”. Keep this in mind:

• Your audience doesn’t see most of what you post. YOU DO and that’s why it feels redundant to you. No one else sees your content as much as you.
• As long as you’re not posing the same content right away, you’ll be fine. So for example, post it again in 8 weeks, not in 2 days.
• Some social platforms move faster and can take multiple posts on the subject.
• Often times, you need to show your audience the same message a few times before they take action. So it’s ok to repeat yourself.

How to Re-Use Content
Before re-using content, go back through and read it to make sure you don’t need to change anything that sounds out of date.

Create different social posts:

1. Design images and posts that call out different tips or ideas from your content. You can end up creating as many of these as you want. For example, if your article is “5 ways to pets cats” then you essentially have 5 different themed posts you can create. Each post features one of the 5 ways to pet a cat and you can end the post with “read all 5 ways here…”
2. Use the same tactic above but create images or videos for posting in stories. Stories disappear after 24 hours, so you can do this as often as you want.
3. Use written content (article or blog post) to create a video. Videos perform well on social media, but also it gives you content to add to YouTube and IG TV video, as well.
4. Create a multi-photo post that features tips/ideas that are listed in your article. For example, each image has a different way to pet a cat. Yes, you’re putting all of your content out there without making someone visit your website, but think of it as trading website visits for social media engagement and growth. 
5. If you’d like to take things a step further, you can look into Content Syndication. This is where you post the content on other platforms. There are free and paid options, see below.

Content Syndication
If you’re interested in Content Syndication, you can look into these platforms:

• Medium
• Quora
• LinkedIn
• SlideShare
• Reddit
• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• Business2Community Outbrain
• Taboola
• Zemanta
• Content.ad
• RevContent
• Sharethrough

One More Idea
A few years ago, while hungover during the holidays, I wrote a blog post on how to use your past social media content to fill your social calendars during Dec and January. You can read that here if you’re interested.

Don’t Be Shy, Re-Apply
Ok, that was a horrible rhyme. But you get the point. Re-apply, aka Re-use, your content so it continues to work hard for you. Having evergreen content that you continue to re-use WORKS. It continues to drive traffic to your website, helps host conversations on social media, and it saves your budget because you’re re-using instead of paying for more new content.

Have fun getting creative with your old content!