In this article, we'll explore how to fuel your content engine and give your content a second life using the dynamic power of video. Say goodbye to content burnout and hello to a steady, captivating social media flow.
Explore our webinar, 'Give your content a second life using video', featured below. It delves into the article's key points and guides you through the process of making case study videos.
The undeniable impact of consistent posting
The most common reason companies fail on social media is not because they don’t know what to do. It’s because they don’t have a strategy for producing all the content they need.
How much and how consistently you post on your social channels is the number one indicator of how well your channels perform.
In fact, Braydon Cohen, Manager of Social Media Marketing at Hootsuite, supports this by saying, “Daily posting will grow followers 4x faster than posting less than once a week. Makes sense: more visibility.”
But how can you maintain this consistency without running out of ideas or burning out? The trick is to build a smart content engine that lets you do more but with less content.
What is a content engine?
A content engine isn’t just a buzzword; it's your strategic approach for making lots of content easily to win on social media, without feeling overwhelmed or exhausted.
Without a good plan or content engine, companies usually run into problems. Have you noticed these before?
- The person making the content burns out because they’re always starting from zero.
- The person in charge of social has so many other jobs to do that making content for social media gets put to the side.
Managing and performing on different channels—paid, organic, and catering to varied audience segments—can put some pretty tough demands on social media managers and creators.
But with the right content engine in place, the load gets a lot lighter.
Fueling the content engine: The 90-10 rule
Like the metaphor implies your content engine needs constant fuel to keep running. But if you're going to keep all your channels going with engaging content you have to get smart about how you work with production.
At Storykit, we employ a 90-10 rule: approximately 90% of our content, possibly more, is repurposed from various sources like blogs, case studies, interviews, and webinars for social media.
This ensures alignment with our message across different channels, funnel stages, and audience segments, with minimal additional effort.
The remaining 10% of our social media posts come from other sources of inspiration. This could be trend discussions, company announcements, memes, and more, to keep the content diverse and engaging
The 90-10 approach keeps us posting multiple times a day across 4 channels without content production taking up too much of Heidi (our amazing Community Manager’s) time.
For example, here is a screenshot of Heidi’s summer content schedule. For each day, she identified a particular piece of content to spotlight and, based on it, created four videos tailored for each platform.
Why use video to give your content a second life?
If you follow us, you've likely encountered our enthusiasm for video (since we use video for pretty much everything). But here’s a refresher on why video is the best format for repurposing your content on social media:
- Retention: Video captures attention remarkably well, with viewers retaining 95% of a message compared to just 10% through text.
- Engagement: 66% of consumers reported short-form videos to be the most engaging type of social media content in 2022, up from 50% in 2020.
- Customer acquisition: 93% of companies have acquired new customer(s) via social media video.
- Flexible and practical: Video is an incredibly versatile medium, capable of adapting to various types of information and content styles, whereas text or text with images may only be effective for limited content/post types.
5 steps to create a content engine that will keep your social channels buzzing
Settle in and get ready to build a content engine that'll keep your social channels buzzing daily, just like Heidi's. Follow this simple process to generate tons of post ideas, and with just about 30 minutes each time, you can keep the cycle going on repeat.
1. Identify a content opportunity
Dive into your current content library and select a focal point. It could be an article, webpage, ebook, report, case study, etc.
Example: For example, the content piece that we are going to use is THIS ARTICLE, that you are currently reading. We want to get as much use out of it as possible right when we hit publish.
2. Think about what goals you want to achieve
Decide what you want to achieve with your videos: drive website visits, educate viewers in the feed, or generate leads? The goals you choose will determine the types of videos you create.
Example: We recognize that not everyone wants to click through and read this entire article, so we're bringing the insights to them via video. Our aim is to enlighten viewers directly in the feed about the merits of a streamlined content engine, guide them through building one, and demonstrate how to efficiently repurpose content into video.
3. Identify elements that can be repurposed for your audience
Use parts of your existing content to make new, clear, and engaging video topics. Think, “How can I split this up in different ways to get specific points across or make things clearer?”
Example: We want to target social media marketers and content creators. With that in mind, here are some angles we can pull out of this article to target them:
- A promotion of the article in general
- The undeniable impact of consistent posting
- Quote and statistic by Braydon Cohen
- Explanation of what a content engine is
- The 90-10 rule and how to achieve it
- Our 5 steps to create a content engine
- Why video is great for repurposing content
- Etc. (we could keep this list going forever)
4. Create the videos based on the angles you have identified
Time for the fun part! To transform your content ideas into engaging videos for social media. We mostly use Storykit AI for this - it's as easy as copy-pasting the article into the AI, telling it the angle we're aiming for, and voila! It summarizes the text just the way we want.
Example: We turned all the ideas we came up with above into videos, giving us two weeks of informative posts. (Hit follow on our LinkedIn here, and see them pop up in your feed!)
Explore them all below:
- A promotion of the article in general
- The undeniable impact of consistent posting
- Quote and statistic by Braydon Cohen
- Explanation of what a content engine is
- The 90-10 rule and how to achieve it
- Our 5 steps to create a content engine
- Why video is great for repurposing content
5. SHARE AWAY
Now, share your videos. Think about the best channel for each video and adjust them to get the best results.
Example: We will be posting all of these videos on LinkedIn because this is where our primary audience is. However, we also know that some of these videos will fit well on our Instagram, so we will change the dimensions and post a few of them there as well.
Conclusion
Building a content engine that effectively utilizes video and repurposing strategies is a game changer when it comes to maintaining a vibrant and engaging social media presence and preventing creative burnout.
By ensuring that your content is not only consistent but also strategically distributed and repurposed, you pave the way for sustainable growth and enhanced audience engagement on your social channels. And don’t forget to continuously assess the performance of your content and optimize your strategy for better engagement and reach.
