Nobody wants to come off as inauthentic or a robot. When companies spam social media feeds with the same copy-and-pasted posts, they can come off this way. Reposting is a tricky strategy and can come at the risk of looking lazy to a select group of people. A lot of the time, though, reposting can be advantageous.
Reposting content is a social media management and marketing tool that many businesses strategically implement to increase their reach. Using one of your previous posts again can save time and allow you to reach an even wider audience than before.
To understand the value of reposting, you must evaluate how previous posts performed using analytics tools and engagement metrics. Reposting also ensures that content reaches the eyes of everyone or the largest possible group of your followers.
Tread carefully, however. You want to follow general guidelines of courtesy and judgment when reposting. All of these aspects considered, it should work for your strategy.
Today, we’ll dive deeper into reposting content on LinkedIn. We’ll analyze when and why it works, and share some helpful tips for getting the most out of resposting.
Expand the Reach of Content
You don’t always have to create posts from scratch to give your followers new information. Especially if you are using LinkedIn to promote your business or brand, content on average only reaches about 10% of your network. This is a glaringly low statistic. Obviously, it is hard to reach a wide audience if your content is not going trending or going viral. But who would have known how difficult it would be just to reach your current audience?
This is where reposting comes into play. Knowing that only a fraction of your audience has probably seen the original content on your blog. If the post was from a long enough time ago, you should be clear to repost it on LinkedIn. By doing so, you can ensure that you can spread out your content and have it seen by the largest possible audience.
Leverage Analytics
Analytics are an important part of any marketing or social media strategy. You have to be aware of how your effort and time are spent. Metrics from your blog and social media are invaluable because they can change your strategy in the future.
Use analytics to ramp up your social media strategies and figure out what to repost. View analytics and gain important insights and visitor information about your posts. Use this information to find out which posts generated the most views, engagement, conversions, and more. The posts that did the best on your website or other channels are the ones you should focus on reposting on LinkedIn.
You should also monitor the analytics on LinkedIn so you know which posts perform best there. LinkedIn analytics can also guide your reposting strategy moving forward. The top LinkedIn analytics to watch include:
Views, Comments, and Likes
On every single piece of content that you share, you can view the post’s performance. Three key performance metrics are views, likes, and comments. Views help you assess the reach of the post, whereas comments and likes are forms of engagement.
If a post has many views but not many likes or comments, it may not have gotten in front of the right audience. Furthermore, lack of engagement on a highly-viewed post suggests opportunities to increase engagement through a call to action, question, or another method.
Look for posts with a proven track record of having all three figures be as high as possible to ensure success when reposting.
Details About Your Audience
Besides just seeing how many likes, comments, and views your posts gain, you can also see more detailed analytics about who is interacting with your content. One helpful feature is the ability to see where your viewers are, what company they work for, and what they do.
Location, job title, and company can help you determine what kinds of people and what regions are resonating with your posts the most. Of course, you want to focus on the content that resonates best with your target audience.
Rules, Tips, and Tricks for Reposting
You want to be smart when doing something that is not generally seen as the most honest or creative. However, it can be a very smart use of time and beneficial for all to repost past hits. While there are no official rules to reusing content, you want to make sure that you don’t make mistakes and leave followers untrusting of your brand.
- Wait for 3 to 6 months before replicating the same post. This allows for enough time for casual visitors to either forget about your post or not see the old one when searching back in your feed. Furthermore, you may gain many new followers in this time who never saw the original content.
- Only repost content if you are a consistent content creator. Make sure that you are posting multiple times a week if you want to post something from just a few months ago. This way, the repost will mix in with your new, original content. If you only post a handful of times per year, then reposted content is very obvious.
- Don’t repost the posts only because you like them. Be objective when choosing what to repost Repost the content that showed potential with your audience. Use the analytics feature on whatever social media platform you are using to your advantage, and try to replicate past success.
Repurposing and Republishing on LinkedIn
Other than just reposting old posts, LinkedIn recommends the idea of either republishing or repurposing old content. Simplify your work practices by using old ideas and trustworthy posts but re-purposing them in a way that renews their relevance.
For example, tie in a news story or current trend when you repost the article. Also, there is always the option to republish articles: use the share feature to put your past work back on the feed. There are plenty of tips on how to maximize success while doing this from LinkedIn itself, but mainly wait 2 or more weeks before republishing content.
Reposting Can Work
When coming up with a strategy, you always want to find something that is proven to work and gives you more time to do things that you want. This is why reposting is such an easy idea to help you succeed with both of those strategic goals.
For one, it can be a great way to reach sections of your following that have yet to see a certain post. More likely than not, if somebody happens to view your post for the second time, they will just scroll on and not let it negatively affect their perception of you. For another, it cuts down risk and keeps people interested and engaged with your page.
As long as you make sure to make good use of analytics and follow certain guidelines for best practice, reposting can be super successful for your LinkedIn.
