How To Bring Old Content Back To Life And Discover New Levels Of Engagement

In an increasingly fast-paced digital world, we are constantly bombarded with new content. 24-hour news cycles have created a platform for a constant stream of content and continuous access to social channels through mobile devices means that content is always in our pocket. For brands, it can become a full-time job trying to keep up with the endless consumption of content that customers seemingly demand. Trying to figure out what to post on social channels to grab customers’ attention is a task of Herculean proportions.

Whilst it’s true that fresh content is an essential element of digital marketing and customer engagement, many businesses are too caught up in this whirlwind of content to pause and take note. With a constant emphasis on new content, quality sometimes gets lost in the drive to create, and analytics - the question of how your content is being received - often goes out the window altogether.

This means that businesses are missing valuable opportunities to learn about their audience and the content they appreciate. Sometimes, a high-performing piece of content will engage your audience better the second time around, and your most engaging content might be something your audience will appreciate time and again.

Engage And Re-Engage: Begin By Discovering Your High Performing Content

Working hard or working smart? You could exhaust your creative juices coming up with fresh content every day - or you could rediscover your top performing content from the past. Let’s take a look at how you do that.

1. Utilize Analytics

Taking advantage of the analytic tools that are out there can revolutionize your content. Sometimes engaging with social media can feel like shouting into the void - and it’s so frustrating when you post some hard-earned content, only for it to seemingly slip under the radar. Analytics provides you with the context for how your audience is engaging with your post - remember, knowledge is power.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there for exploring the performance of your content. You’ll be able to see, out of all your content, what was the most viewed and the most shared. Google’s Analytic tools are far from the only option out there too, so if you want more specificity in how you approach your data, explore some other options.

2. Social Statistics

Most social media platforms have their own analytics that you can access somewhere in the backdrop of your account. Instagram, for example, offers businesses the ability to see how many shares their post has had, as well as how many profile views came as a direct result from your post.

“Tracking your most-shared content is an essential way of identifying your top-performing posts,” says Jennifer Erwin, a content expert at Boomessays. “When posts get shared that gives your engagement existential growth - the holy grail of content marketing.” Utilize social platforms’ own internal analytics to identify which posts are resonating with your audience and getting the best reach - this will give you an archive of great content to draw upon in the future.

Bringing Your Content Back To Life

Having identified your top-performing content of yore, you have the opportunity to re-engage your audience with it and expand the reach of your social media. Sometimes simply reposting your content with a simple introduction such as “One from the archives…” might be enough to merit a share. But to get the most life out of your content you can reanimate it for new audiences. Let’s see the best ways to bring your content back to life. In addition, you can always hire a freelancer to create custom animations, graphic designs or extra copy to give your content the boost it needs, provided it’s within your budget.

1. Repurposing Content Into New Forms

There are so many ways you can share content from text to video, images to infographics. And different platforms encourage information to be shared in different ways. For example, a text post that you have identified as performing well on Facebook could be repurposed into a series of slides for an information Instagram post.

Get creative with how you repurpose your best-performing content and you’ll give it a second lease of life. Even platforms that predominantly encourage sharing in one form - such as Instagram and images - are ripe for subverting with alternative content. See how microblogging on Instagram has taken off. Your content can take so many forms!

2. Leverage The Reach Of Influencers And Bloggers

Influencers are a big deal across multiple social platforms and they’ve curated a unique, authentic, and highly engaged audience that’s just waiting for your content. You can approach influencers by direct message to see if they’re interested in working for you or, take a more organic approach by engaging with them on their own accounts first.

By getting the attention of those with big followings you increase the chance of getting them to share your content with their audience. If they like your posts, this can happen entirely organically. This is a great strategy for bloggers too who have their own curated audience.

3. Discover New Platforms For Your Content

It feels like new social platforms are created every day so it’s likely there’ll be one or two out there that you haven’t gotten onto yet. Even if the majority of these platforms never compete with the likes of Facebook or Instagram you never know which will be the next big thing.

What’s more, each platform will have its own demographic as an audience. From Tik Tok to LinkedIn, there’s always a new audience for your content.

4. Personalize Content For Key Viewers

Whatever your industry, there will be some major discrepancies in your target market. Take your old content and tweak it in a way that appeals to specific subsets of the demographics you’re trying to reach. Personalize content to create tailored posts that maximize engagement.

Measuring Your Content’s Engagement

Lastly, it’s essential to measure the engagement your content gets. This will guide your strategy in the future.

1. Comments

Whilst it’s great if people are double-tapping to like the content you’ve posted on Instagram or if your Facebook posts are bringing the thumbs, but comments take precedence over likes in the engagement hierarchy. If people have been interested enough in your post to leave a comment then you know they’re engaged - scan your blog posts and social media to see what people are commenting on, and where.

2. Social Shares

Chances are, your most engaging content is being widely shared. A shared post reaches the audience of whoever has shared it, so it’s not only your followers who are seeing your content but an ever-increasing audience. Incentivizing your followers to share your posts through offers and giveaways can take your engagement to another level.

3. Amount Of Pageviews

For blog posts, pageviews are an important metric in how successful your content has been. For a good sense of how your content is performing you should know a rough average of how many views your blogs get - you can then gauge if a specific content is exceeding expectations. And it’s equally important to know where these views are coming from.

4. Organic Traffic

“Tracking your traffic and identifying how much of it is organic is important to understanding the performance of your post,” says Elizabeth Jenkins, a copywriter at State Of Writing. Organic traffic, as opposed to paid traffic resulting from ads, will indicate that your content is being shared far and wide.

5. Realtime Tools

LiveSession is a fantastic tool that lets you record and replay the way your customers have interacted with your content on social channels. LiveSession gives you the ability to see through your customers eyes and can provide great insight into how customers engage with your content. For example, you can assess where customers' attention is being directed - if you have highly informative content with a mixture of infographics and text, this analytic tool can make it clear if people are engaging with the whole post or just certain elements. You’ll be able to recycle popular graphics in your content cycle once you have this data.

6. Engagement With Target Accounts

Does the engagement on your content have a strong overlap with the accounts you’re most interested in reaching? If you’ve identified niche target markets you can gauge the performance of your content both in terms of absolute numbers as well as in how these demographics are engaging with your content. Ideally, everyone who likes, comments and shares your posts is a potential customer - once you’ve maximized engagement with an audience that is tailored to the demands of your products, your business is ready to grow.

Wrapping Up

The drive for fresh content can sometimes be fallacious - old content can be brought back to life with these strategies. By finding new platforms, new audiences and by tweaking old content into new forms you can find next level engagement with the content you’re already sitting on. Don’t forget the value of analytics to discover your top content, as well as to continually measure your content’s performance and adjust your strategies accordingly. Don’t exhaust yourself with constant new content - recycle your content for a green strategy.