It’s generally understood in content marketing that originality and freshness is the way to go. In many ways, that’s a good mindset, no one wants to see the same content shared again and again, but it puts small business owners in something of a quandary. Good content is expensive. Writing blog posts is time-consuming if you do it yourself and money-consuming if you pay someone else to do it. That applies even more strongly to high-value content like infographics and ebooks.
Sharing content only once limits the available audience considerably. To get the best ROI for content, it makes sense to reshare it to maximize reach and engagement. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with sharing content more than once, especially if you do it the right way.
Resharing The Wrong Way
You’re a busy business owner and don’t have time to write more than one blog post per week. You want to maximize exposure for your weekly piece of high-quality content, so you schedule repeated sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. You figure that different people will be online at different points in the day and the week, so you use Buffer to schedule sharing of your blog post twice a day throughout the week of its publication.
That may seem an extreme example but I’ve seen small businesses do it. Sometimes they mix it up with a bit of lead-gen or sales copy, but their social media almost entirely consists of the same article shared over and over again.
Needless to say, this is an excellent way to get your business’ social media audience to unfollow you. Sure, more people will see the post, but the same people will see it repeatedly.
Resharing The Right Way
You want to maximize exposure for your content, but don’t want to annoy your audience. You should keep two things in mind:
- You can share repeatedly so long as there is a reasonable interval between shares.
- You must share a mix of links, not just your own content.
Your sharing schedule depends on your audience, but my favorite sharing cadence looks something like this for a weekly blog post:
- Shared on the morning of publication, followed by a reshare later that day, usually mid-afternoon.
- Share once the next day, using a different image and original text for the post on social media.
- Share once the following week, on a different day to the publication of new content.
- Share again the following month, again on a different day to the publication of original content.
- Schedule reshares every couple of months at random intervals. There are WordPress plugins to help with this, such as Tweet Old Post.
Along with resharing your own content, you should be actively engaged in content curation: sharing relevant high-quality content. Most small businesses can’t generate enough content to maintain an active social media presence, and curation helps keep followers engaged and informed.
If you’re smart about resharing, it’s entirely possible to expose content to the widest possible audience without alienating follo