Recycling Content - Where to now after recent changes to the Facebook news feed?

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In 2017 in Australia, one of the most popular programs on TV was a documentary series on the ABC called the War on Waste.

It sparked a myriad of conversations online and offline about the state of waste in our country. It also got people to look long and hard at what we waste and how we can better recycle - especially coffee cups. I think sales of keep cups went through the roof after that series.

In a culture that often throws so much stuff away we need to get better at recycling and reusing stuff as much as we can. If we want a truly sustainable future, this is really important.

This attitude to sustainability is behind my approach to content recycling. We can’t be on the content creation treadmill too much as it is just not sustainable for our mental health nor our business health.

With all the current news regarding the massive changes to Facebook and how Facebook is going to view our business pages and the engagement within them - where does that leave automating or recycling your content?

In the past many people have suggested that we stop automating and recycling our content on Facebook. In particular that we stop automatically posting content to our Facebook pages from third-party apps (like Hootsuite for example). For my money, recycling content is still going to be a big part of my content marketing plans for 2018 . however I am going to try a different tack to posting on my Facebook page itself this year. 

Introducing A.R.C

My business mantra for 2018.

Automate.

Replicate

Communicate.

If I was only to write fresh content weekly and never then reshare that content across my social channels later in the year, I would have a breakdown.

Why spend time crafting a well thought out and valuable blog post that you then only ever share once? What about future people who engage with you? What about new people on your list, or your social channel or just people searching for your online?

I still believe that there is a place for automating your content scheduling, the key is to be mindful of how you lead into the content that you are sharing again and on platforms and areas that you do choose to do this.

I will show you what I mean in a typical scenario for me.

In 2017, I used Sendible to schedule my content on Facebook (groups and pages), LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. This included both fresh content and historical content that I recycled. I have queues set up to help me manage this so that content is recycled on different days on different platforms and in different orders. I aim to keep it fresh and provide a different focus appropriate for each platform.

I don’t recycle content on Instagram - it is always new.

So the typical process I follow after I write a blog post is this one.

  1. Write a blog post and release on website. This happens each Tuesday (well sometimes I miss a Tuesday)

  2. Create email campaign around my blog post to send to my list

  3. Schedule blog post inside Sendible across all my channels - LinkedIn, Facebook Groups and Twitter

  4. Pin post to Pinterest

  5. Manually drop schedule post inside Facebook. This is new for 2018. With Facebook change to how the news feed works, I am going to experiment with what happens when I make the effort to schedule my content from inside Facebook

What I do after that is to drop the content into my various queues to recycle later in the year on set schedules. Setting the queues up took a little time, but once done it is easy to drop my content into the appropriate queue with the best lead in text for that platform. It can then be is shared out on autopilot. It was so fantastic when was done and I started to see growth in my website traffic as a result.

I post quite frequently on Twitter due to the fast paced nature of twitter (almost daily and sometimes twice a day). I share my content inside LinkedIn three times a week and I share content into my Facebook groups on a Thursday for recycled content and then on Tuesday for my fresh stuff. All of this is done via Sendible.

With Pinterest, I use Boardbooster to recycle my content around. Pinterest is a search engine, not a social media channel this is a really important distinction in terms of how you approach your content marketing strategy here. BoardBooster allows me to schedule the repinning of my own pins, so that they come to the top of my boards and can more easily be found by others. I also use Tailwind to find other pins to share as well as give my own work some more love.

I am at the very beginning of my Pinterest journey, as I only started with a clear strategy in mind for this platform about midway through last year. I am slowing growing both my following as well as the more important traffic back to my website. If you are in the B2B space with small business owners, then Pinterest could be a new avenue for you in 2018.

So what now for recycled content with this new directive from Facebook?

I am going to continue to recycle my content, but I am going to take the time to schedule these recycled posts into Facebook directly using there scheduling tool (sounds like a great job for my VA 18-year-old daughter).

My focus for 2018 is on building connections and a community around those connections to inspire people to work with me, to buy my products and to help them make a difference to their business bottom line from the content and ideas that I am sharing with them.

And so to the A.R.C mantra - Automate, Replicate, Communicate

  • If I don’t automate processes where I can.
  • If I don’t replicate processes where I can.
  • I will have no time to communicate wherever and whenever I can.

And that is the most important thing I need to be doing.