Repurposing Content

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The Benefits of Repurposing Video Content

Repurposing video content is an approach that takes existing content, refreshes it, remixes it, and often puts an entirely new spin on it to create something totally new and wonderfully different.

  • Improved SEO

  • Better audience targeting

  • Wider distribution

  • More video views

  • A way to refresh outdated content

Maximize Your Content Investments

Creating content usually takes a lot of time and can cost a lot of money, and those are things that not every marketing department or brand has excess amounts of. Repurposing video content can absolutely help maximize the existing investments you have already made. Repurposing content can take a lot of that great, old content and give it a breath of fresh air (and some much-needed visibility).

What Is Repurposing Content?

Repurposing content is the practice of reusing all or elements of existing content in order to expand that content’s reach. Repurposed content is typically transformed into a new format, for example, turning a testimonial video into shorter social media clips. Video is actually quite simple to repurpose. With some planning and a thoughtful approach, one video story can be told in dozens of different ways.

14 Ideas: How to Repurpose Video Content

1.    Transcribe Your Videos

If you have watched a TED Talk or two. Their videos are highly engaging, but the other thing that TED does right is transcribing each piece of video content they post. These transcriptions are featured below the video in an interactive format and also form the basis of blog posts that repurpose the original video content. Transcribing your videos has a lot of benefits. For starters, transcribing your videos can make them more search-friendly because closed captions are something that Google can index (Google can’t read visual content, just the metadata that accompanies it). There are tons of services to choose from for transcribing videos and it’s very affordable and fast to do. You can check out speech-recognition software like Dragon, or Camtasia. For a human touch, there’s Speechpad, which costs about $1 per audio minute for transcription. Or you can always enlist the help of an intern.

2.    Break Your Videos Into Shorter Clips

How your audience interacts with video is based on where they view it. To engage viewers, it’s best to customize your video to the platform where it will be shared, whether it’s your website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or elsewhere. When you plan out your video content and budget, make sure to speak to your videographer about customizing the video’s length for different platforms. If you didn’t do that, don’t worry – it’s something that can be completed in-house or given back to your videographer for a low fee. Here are some suggested video lengths: The optimal video length for YouTube is around 10x longer than it is for Facebook – 14.5 minutes for YouTube versus 1.3 minutes for Facebook. Twitter video’s maximum is 30 seconds Instagram’s video maxes out at 60 seconds IGTV though maxes out at 15 minutes. Viewers who are entertained and informed by these shorter versions will often continue to your YouTube channel or website to watch the full video. And remember, these customized video versions receive more views and better engagement if you upload them natively to each social platform.

3.    Make an Audio Podcast

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Some video content and especially longer form informative videos could be excellent candidates to repurpose as podcasts. For example, Social Media Examiner has recently turned their popular news videocast ‘The Social Media Marketing Talk Show‘ into an audio podcast. By doing this they now reach a larger audience. A popular tool for doing this type of video repurposing is Audacity. With this tool converting a video to an audio file is relatively straightforward. Upload your video to audacity, add an intro and choose ‘mp3’ as the file format when you export your edited file. (Image: screen grab from Audacity for Mac)

4.    Turn Video Content Into a Blog Post

Video can add value to your blog posts but search engines and probably some of your readers still like written content too. Creating a transcription or a blog post based on your video makes it accessible to readers, viewers, and search spiders. So, embed your video in a blog post and as mentioned above transcribe the key points for readers. A popular tool for doing this type of video repurposing is Rev.com which offers a low-cost transcription service.

5.    Make a One-Minute Trailer for Instagram

If you have a long form video creating a one-minute trailer that links to your longer form content can help it get more views. Choose either a hook that tells people what value they’ll get from watching the whole thing or find an amusing section to draw them in. A popular tool for doing this type of video repurposing is Instasize. Even though you can upload landscape and portrait video to Instagram, the square video format is still the best. It takes up more space in the feed and matches the Instagram style. Instasize works on both iOS and Android and lets you add a square background to your videos and photos. Recommend creating a branded background image first using a photo editing tool and then use it as a background for all your videos.

6.    Create an Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook Story

Tease your Snapchat or Instagram audience with snippets of your videos. Crop your video to a portrait format, chop it into 15-second segments (or 10 for Snapchat) and upload it one piece at a time to your story. A popular tool for doing this type of video repurposing is Cutstory which is a free tool for iPhone users (sorry Android users) that lets you seamlessly snip long videos into Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook story sized clips.

7.    Make a Twitter Trailer

Twitter allows up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds of video (that’s 140 seconds — very clever Twitter). Just like you did for Instagram cut a few short versions of your video for Twitter trailers linking to a longer Facebook or YouTube version. Video superstar Gary Vaynerchuk makes good use of video on his Twitter account. Using square video with text overlay will grab the audience’s attention in the feed. A popular tool for doing this type of video repurposing is Twitter Media Studio. In fact, did you know that Twitter stores every image and video you create in a media studio so you can access them again? A popular IOS tool for adding text overlay to your video iOS is VONT which offers a lot of different font styles.

8.    Make a SlideShare Presentation

SlideShare which is owned by LinkedIn (which is owned by Microsoft) is a medium specifically designed for presentations. You can repurpose your videos in the form of SlideShare presentations to restate your message in a short, effective, and aesthetically appealing manner. A call-to-action button at the end of the SlideShare presentation is recommended to increase your landing page traffic.

9.    Themed Testimonial Promotions

Testimonial videos are proven to be highly effective. Maybe you have quite a few solo testimonial videos that can be grouped together to tell a more detailed themed story?

10.Repurpose Corporate Video for Social  

Do you have a long form corporate video? You can use clips from it showcase different aspects of your company. It may require adding some cool music, and some on-screen graphics. Maybe a video the company’s culture, or even a tour of your office, like a behind the scenes look.

11.About our Founders

If your corporate video features the senior leadership team, depending on the content, you can take direct quotes and turn them into or an About our Founders” page.

12.Q&A/FAQ

If you have some interview style video content, perhaps you can use shorter clips or quotes to create a Q&A/FAQ video or page.

13.Silent Background Video

Perhaps some of your older videos would be perfect for using as a silent background video that is quite popular on many websites

14. Repurpose Your Webinars

Truth be told most webinars tend to be long and maybe not too exciting. If you have a lot of webinar videos though, you do have opportunities to make short trailers with highlights of each webinar and then distribute it on your social media channels. Cut out the boring stuff and highlight the juicy tidbits. Not only this is an incredibly easy format to consume, but you for those who missed the full webinar may decide it is worth a watch. These shortened promos can also be used to promote future webinars.

WRAP UP

Video is one of the best forms of content for repurposing and there are lots of different ways to get creative with it. The easiest way to get started is to transcribe your video content and break it into shorter clips, based on theme and suggested length for various social platforms. From there, you can use your new written and visual content in various ways to stretch the life of your video(s), improve SEO rankings, target your audience in better ways, increase distribution, and get more eyes on your content. Hope this gives you some inspiration. Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions or other creative suggestions!

Are you looking to repurpose any of your existing video content? If so, lets chat. We offer special packages for doing this.

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