How To Use AI To Repurpose Content Across Social Media

Once upon a time, social media wasn’t inundated with millions of posts per minute.

As a brand, you could publish a video, photo, or blog post, then sit back and watch the views and likes roll in. Marketers today, however, are fighting a more uphill battle to get their content noticed (and by the right people).

With social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads feeling more and more crowded each day, it’s important that marketers have a constant stream of helpful and interesting content they can publish. But, that can get exhausting and creatively draining, fast. 

Fortunately, repurposing your content can help combat creative burnout, while driving better distribution across all of your content efforts. 

Let’s dive into how you can repurpose your content for social media in 3 easy steps! But first, let’s talk through why that matters.

The benefits of repurposing content for social media

Repurposing your best content for social media ensures that you can:

• Get the most out of your existing content
• Increase your content’s reach
• Experiment with different content formats and topics to see what works best
  

Save time by reusing what you already have

Creating fresh content can be time-consuming and resource-intensive—especially when you’re tasked with consistently creating  content for your blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok (phew 🥵).

When you repurpose content, you take an existing piece of content and tweak or edit it to suit a variety of different channels. Since the bulk of the work has already been done in creating the content, your team saves valuable time (and budget!) by not having to create net-new content from scratch across each channel.

💡 Aim for: 25% of time spent on content creation, 75% on distribution.

Increase content reach and visibility

Different social media platforms cater to different audiences. For instance, users under the age of 25 tend to prefer TikTok and Instagram, while users over 25 prefer Facebook and Twitter. People might use LinkedIn to access and share more professional content, then switch to Pinterest to get home decor inspo,  and hop into Snapchat to keep up with friends.

Repurposing your content to suit multiple different platforms means that you can reach a wider audience than you would by publishing it to one channel alone. For instance, a search-optimized blog post may be found by a potential client searching for information via Google. But that same blog post, when repurposed into an infographic and a series of social media posts, might also gain you new readers and followers on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Build a new feedback loop around what’s resonating (or not) with your audience

The internet can be a cruel place but, if nothing else, it’s an honest one. If users don’t like your content, they won’t comment on it or re-share it—so you can quickly discover what type of content is (or isn’t!) resonating with your audience.

By experimenting with different formats for different platforms, you can also uncover fresh ways to deliver your message to your audience—then build on that to create even more engaging content in the future.

3 steps to repurposing your content for social media

To make the most of your content repurposing, you’ll want to make sure you come up with a repurposing plan for every piece of content you make. Here’s how you can create a simple, repeatable process for it.

Step 1: Scan your content for repurposing opportunities

Not every piece of content will be a good fit for every channel, which means you’ll need to actively review content to scope out potential repurposing opportunities.

When reviewing your content—whether it’s a podcast episode, webinar recording, blog post, ebook, or research report—look out for:

• Interesting quotes that would stand out on social media
• Stats or data that could be turned into infographics or standalone social posts
• Stories that might be relevant to specific user bases on different platforms (like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram)
• Short video segments that could be clipped for social media

To help speed up the process, you can also use a generative AI tool like Chat by Copy.ai to brainstorm content repurposing ideas. Just write out a prompt that includes a link to your original piece of content:

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Chat will then deliver a few ideas for each social media channel in order to kick off your brainstorming:

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As you plan out your content and social media strategies, don’t just think about how you can repurpose content to enhance future pieces—consider how you can use it to enhance your existing content too, such as adding new stats, videos, and social posts to old blog posts.

Step 2: Generate your repurposed content

Once you’ve decided what type of repurposing opportunities exist for a piece of content, it’s time to actually create that content. This is an area where generative AI tools—like Copy.ai—can significantly speed up your process.

Let’s run through a few examples of how to repurpose different types of content for social media with AI.

Turn blog posts into social media posts

While it used to be common practice to simply share a link to your latest blog post on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, you’ll likely see diminishing returns from this approach today—and for good reason. According to Hootsuite, LinkedIn and Twitter posts that don’t include links or calls-to-action tend to get better engagement. (In fact, posts on LinkedIn without links enjoyed six times the reach, four times the reactions, and 18 times more comments than the average post with a link!)

So, rather than try to fight user preference, repurpose your blog post into a post that’s custom-built for the channel you’re posting it to. 

For instance, if you wanted to repurpose Copy.ai’s “7 Prompt Writing Improvements You Can Make Today” blog post into a LinkedIn post, you could write the following prompt into Chat by Copy.ai: 

And here’s what you’d get as a result (complete with emojis and hashtags!):

To create a new post for a different channel—such as Twitter—simply try a new prompt:

The result? A thread of eight tweets, ready to go:

When it comes to image or video-focused platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Copy.ai can’t actually generate images or videos (at least, not yet). However, it can scan the original blog post for you and give you a list of potential content ideas.

For instance, here’s a prompt you could use:

And here are the ideas Chat would deliver:

Of course, you’ll only want to focus on the social media channels that move the needle for you, but working with Chat can cut down on your brainstorming time.

If you’re exploring AI platforms to repurpose content into video or image formats, you should check out:

• For graphics: Midjourney and Canva
• For video: Vidon AI

Repurpose ebooks and whitepapers into blog posts and social media content

Long-form content like ebooks and whitepapers are ripe for reformatting into shorter, more digestible pieces of content. 

Repurpose into blog posts

Think of this as a halfway point to repurposing these big pieces of content into social media content. First, you can repurpose these long-form pieces of content into blog content (which will make repurposing them into social content easier), including:

• Writing a single blog post that summarizes an ebook or whitepaper’s main points
• Writing several blog posts that cover different sections of the original content (but in more depth)

So, for instance, if you wanted to repurpose this ebook on increasing your personal productivity, you could simply instruct Chat:

Chat would then produce a concise blog post summarizing the main points of the ebook, complete with a title, headers, and a conclusion:

To repurpose the ebook or whitepaper on social media, you could also:

• Create a carousel to share the content’s key takeaways on Instagram
• Instruct Chat to repurpose the ebook, whitepaper, or blog content into a Twitter thread, LinkedIn post, and/or LinkedIn article (as seen in the section above!)

Transform webinars into blog posts, text and video-based social media posts

Running an online event can be a great way to generate leads, educate prospects, and increase customer retention—but it can also be a pricey endeavor. Repurposing webinar content after the fact can help increase your return on investment (ROI) and draw in more leads long after the event is over.

There are a few great ways you can repurpose webinar content:

• Highlight key webinar moments in short video clips, which you can share to social media and embed in blog posts.
• Use an AI transcriber like Descript (this is what we use at Copy.ai!) to transcribe your webinar in minutes, then turn select quotes into images you can share on social media. Design software like Canva can help even the most un-artistic marketers create share-worthy graphics in no time.
• Create a blog post that summarizes the webinar’s key points, or—if your webinar covers a variety of topics—build out separate blog posts that dive into each key point. (The same applies to LinkedIn posts and articles.)
• Create a podcast episode that features takeaways from the podcast episode. You can add your own commentary and include audio clips from the webinar. Repurpose clips from this onto social media.
• Break the video down into shorter segments and create a short video series on YouTube.
• Capture client testimonials as shorter video clips to share on Instagram, Facebook, and more.

Want to speed up the process of transforming your webinar into a blog post? Just pop your AI-transcribed webinar into Chat and ask it to create a new blog post from the material.

Turn research reports into copy for LinkedIn slide decks

Publishing research can be a great way for companies to stand out as thought leaders in their industries—however, on average, a custom market research project can easily cost organizations between $20,000 and $50,000.

To boost the ROI of publishing your own research, repurpose your research reports into social media posts, such as slide decks for LinkedIn. 

To speed up the process, you can ask Chat to generate the copy for those slides:

Just a minute later, Chat will return potential stats for you to use in your slide deck and other social media posts:

If you’re looking for a certain type of stats, just play with your AI prompts until Chat delivers what you’re looking for.

Step 3: Schedule, publish, and track

Once you’ve generated your repurposed content, schedule it in your content calendar and publish. Then, keep an eye on your metrics: note which posts seem most popular among your audience and which haven’t struck the right chord. This information will help you refine your repurposing efforts as you go along—helping your content repurposing process become even more efficient and effective over time.

Rinse and repeat.

Streamline your content repurposing process with generative AI

Unfortunately, AI can’t take over your entire content repurposing process just yet. However, it can significantly speed up the time your team spends on brainstorming, editing, and creating new content. Build it into your content processes to maximize your content’s value and attract new audiences to your work.