When and How to Recycle Your Best Content ♻
Snapshot:
🙁 PROBLEM: You’re getting too hung up on making more content, when you could be saving yourself half the headache by recycling your best posts from the past.
🤔 SOLUTION: Recycle your top-performing content.
🤩 BENEFIT: Reach more people. Deliver your best stuff to your newest followers. Have more predictably positive outcomes.
If one of your focuses is on posting content for your brand, then recycling your best-performing posts from the past is a huge hack that most people forget to do because they're so focused on making new content.
Here's an easy strategy you can follow...
Why Recycling is a Good Thing
Recycling previously best-performing content has a variety of benefits. Some of which are more obvious than others.
5 Benefits of Recycling Content:
Way less work on you
Greater chances of high engagement - based on track record
Past performance notates it’s a high-value piece for your audience
Great for your new audience
Helps steer the direction of new and future content
Combing through your past content to find the best-performing posts is a breeze with the right system, which I’ll share in a moment.
Plus, when reusing content that performed well in the past, not only do you have a more predictable likelihood of positive engagement, which is great for your brand and audience-building efforts, but you can also be more certain that the content is really valuable for your followers.
But…
If recycling content is so great, then why don’t more people take advantage of this powerful growth tactic?
I think there are two points of friction…
Friction Point #1:
You don't measure the performance of the things that you post
I have often fallen guilty to the grind of content creation - mainly because I enjoy it so much - so much so that I forget to look back at how my posts have performed outside of casually noticing the basic metrics such as impressions, views, likes, and comments.
Outside of the basic metrics, the very next challenge becomes how to interpret this data.
Glancing at your analytics doesn't do much past either making you feel good or feel like crap unless you set aside a certain amount of time and mental energy to assess what content did well and what didn't.
This is where determining your KPIs comes into play. KPIs also known as key performance indicators, are the specific metrics you choose to measure as a means to understand if something performed well or not.
Example KPIs from the 2 platforms I care the most about right now:
X (Twitter)
Profile Views from a Post (visited your profile b/c of the post)
Number of Mentions, Retweets, Likes
Post Impressions (how many times it showed up in a feed)
YouTube
Total Video Watch Time
Avg View Duration
Views/Impressions (aka CTR or Click-Through Rate)
Once you've established your KPIs, then it's just a matter of setting performance goals. Admittedly I am not a natural numbers guy. Therefore you may be better at establishing KPIs and setting goals accordingly than I am.
Friction point #2:
You don't have a good system for collecting and analyzing the data
Over this past week, I have realized just how awful my content analytics assessment has been.
As of now, I am posting three short-form videos per day across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Not to mention all the other tweets, threads, and full-length YouTube videos I post.
My Current Content Output:
5 Channels x 3 posts each
+ other ad-hoc posts throughout the day…
= 20 Daily Posts
= 140 Weekly Posts!
= 620 Monthly Posts!!!
Mind you this is all original content - much of it is repurposed according to my Pillar:Micro Content repurposing strategy.
But nonetheless fully original.
Without a system to help me log the data, and filter the top performers based on my KPIs, I’d absolutely be swallowed up in a sea of data, making it easier to just blindly create new content instead of leveraging the useful analytics that are there.
I’ll give you a simple tool to help you with all your data soon, but let’s quickly talk about how often to recycle content, and how much content to scrape off the top to re-use.
When to Recycle & How Much to Recycle
Now that we understand why we ought to be recycling content and have addressed the two major friction points, let’s figure out when and how much to recycle.
Take a moment to digest the chart below.
Let’s highlight the quick notable takeaways from each section:
If you’re posting 1x day, and recycle the top 20% of posts… You’ll have 72 posts at the end of the year (2.4 months of content)
Similarly, if you’re posting 2x day, and recycle the top 10% of posts… You’ll have 72 posts at the end of the year (>1 month of content)
If you’re posting 3x day, and recycle the top 10% of posts… You’ll have 108 posts at the end of the year (>1 month of content)
I recently heard GaryVee state that posting 4x daily on all social media channels is the sweet spot. Right now at least. That’s a lot of content!
Based on GV’s posting cadence here’s the math:
In all of these scenarios, when you get into year two of consistent content creation, you’ll already have a bank of 1-2.5 months worth of TOP PERFORMING content.
Although there’s no rule per se, I think the logical answer to what percentage you should recycle comes down to this…
The more ‘at bats’ you have, the lower the % of top content you’ll likely recycle.
So Do I Trash My Other Content? 🗑️
Nope. Consider this…
Even if a post didn’t make it into your recycle batch, the next layer of ‘decent’ posts (maybe the next best 10-20% depending on your posting frequency) can be dissected and repacked to use as another attempt.
You can tinker with the top-performing posts in a variety of ways such as:
Change the title or caption
Change the Posting/Uploading time of day or day of the week
Re-work the hook
Add or remove a CTA
Reasons to Tinker with your posts before reposting:
Increase Algorithm Friendliness
Increase Engagement metrics
Increase CTA conversions
If it still doesn’t meet the top-performing standard on the next go around, maybe it’s worth sending to the content graveyard - which honestly… is a good thing.
Ever heard the old saying ‘stop beating a dead horse’?
Underperforming content serves as a signal of what not to do - making the process of knowing what to do, a whole lot easier.
It may’ve been a bad topic fit (too advanced or too basic for your audience), didn’t align with your brand persona, or just sucks with the algo and therefore gets no reach - aka no real chance to perform.
Next Steps to Recycling Content
Action Item: Assess your past 30-90 days of content (depending on how often you post) and look for common themes within your top performers.
Next week, I’ll be giving you an entire content recycling database to make this system way easier to apply.
As well as tips on what metrics to pay attention to depending on your platform and goals.
