6 Ways to Repackage Evergreen Content for Cross-Chanel Use

Lauren Owens - August 3, 2012

The number of social media channels available to us today can be daunting. It’s easy to feel as if your time and resources are spread thin when you try to reach every audience on every platform. While it’s important to be where your audience is, it’s also important not to overwhelm your resources.

Luckily, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you approach a new channel. You can repackage your existing evergreen content (content that is always relevant) for use across the channels. Here are six ways to do just that.

1. Turn a blog post into a deck for Slideshare. Take the central ideas from the existing blog post and create a PowerPoint presentation, breaking the post down into bite-sized pieces. Just make sure you’re not ripping the article verbatim – fresh, unique language is a must for SEO.
2. Use images that illustrate the ideas in your blog post and turn them into a slideshow video on YouTube. Simply build the “video” in PowerPoint and then convert the PowerPoint presentation to an .mp4 file.
3. Create an abbreviated version of the original post for use on Tumblr. You can even link back to the original post to gain additional traffic for your site.
4. Create a lens in Squidoo using pieces of information from the original blog post. As with Slideshare, it’s important to repackage the ideas from the original post in a way that uses unique language, and that suits the audience and the channel.
5. Use the images from your blog post to create pins on Pinterest.
6. Create a Google Alert for the central idea in your blog post. Then, when something you’ve already written about makes news, post a quick update on your blog, linking back to the original post. You can then post the new information on Twitter, linking back to the new – brief – blog post.

Notice that the operative word here is “create.” While this work is time consuming, it is simple – because you already did the majority of the work, fleshing out a new idea for use on your blog.

It’s also important to note that these kinds of repackaging techniques should be used sparingly. You would never want to appear redundant or stale. So don’t do everything all of the time. Do some things, some of the time, where it is appropriate for your topic, audience and channel.