It’s the million-dollar questions all marketers want the answer to: when is the best time to post your content?
Whether you’re buying a house, delivering a joke, or sharing your content, timing is everything. Get it right, and things are sure to go well. Get it wrong and at best, it’s crickets.
Repurposing content is all about maximizing ROI, and if better timing means better ROI, then it makes sense that the two go hand-in-hand.
In this podcast episode and blog post, we explore three ways that repurposing your content can help you work out the best time to post your content and how to repurpose your content at the exact right time.
Listen to the podcast episode…
Or read on to learn when the best time to repurpose your content is…
How to find the best time to publish your content
This post would be a lot shorter if we could definitively tell you the best time to publish your content. But no matter how hard studies try to pinpoint the “best” time to share content, there’s no one right time.
For example, social media scheduling company, Later, claim that the absolute best time to publish a feed post on Instagram is 6am on Sunday.
Confusingly, Later’s competitor, Sprout Social, claim the best time to post on Instagram is Tuesday, between 11am and 2pm.
They can’t both be the “best” time, surely?
The truth is that no generic report will tell you the best time to post your content. Your content is completely unique, and so is your audience, so you need to do your own testing to learn what times work best.
You can test different types of content, e.g. video, memes, reels, text posts, on different platforms, at different times. Then analyze what content worked best when and where.
A varied and well-monitored distribution plan will help to give you a good overview of your audience’s behaviors.
To get the data you need quickly, you’ll need a lot of content. If you’re regularly repurposing your content, you will already have a large content library to populate your social media scheduling tool and test times.
But this distribute, test, optimize approach also applies to other types of content. For example, when you publish your podcast episodes, blog posts, upload to YouTube, and so on.
Remember that your audience’s behaviors may not always stay the same. So I advise keeping your analysis going as you continually optimize your content’s distribution.
What if I post content at the wrong time?
Have you ever written an amazing blog post, or created an awesome video, or made a really funny meme, that you can’t wait to share? You’re going to watch the likes and comments roll in, maybe it’ll get shared by others in your industry, perhaps get some press coverage. It might even go viral!
You hit publish, check back a few hours later and…
Well, let’s just say it didn’t meet your performance expectations.
It happens to the best of us. But it might not be that the content was bad, it might just be a case of poor timing.
If your content bombed, do investigate why, but don’t hesitate to reshare it again at a later date. If it’s good, evergreen content, there should be no reason as to why you can’t try it again at a different time, perhaps on a different platform.
Social media content is particularly fickle when it comes to timing. The lifespan of a tweet, for example, is just 15 minutes. It’s likely that only a small percent of your audience actually saw that piece of content. So, if you miss your window of opportunity, create another one by posting it again.
Don’t worry about being repetitive. If you repurpose your content and share it all regularly, you’ll be putting enough varied content out there to break up your messaging.
Plus, if people like something (aka your followers!) they want to see it multiple times – which is why it’s also great to reshare your best performing content.
Also, think about all the new followers you’ve gained since you last shared that piece of content. They haven’t seen it at all yet!
So that’s the second approach: reshare your content at different times.
How to repurpose your content for timely opportunities
The third and final approach is closely related to newsjacking and social listening, and is all about how you can maximize your content’s reach at ideal times.
Now we’re not talking about AM/PM, we’re talking about the wider trends, topics and conversations happening within your industry and beyond.
Say that in 2018 you wrote and published a blog post called “The Ultimate Guide to Being Highly Productive When Working From Home”. It was useful at the time, you did some repurposing, and moved on to create more content.
Then 2020 hits, and the majority of the world’s workforce is encouraged to work from home. Wouldn’t it now make sense to reshare that content?
It doesn’t matter that it’s “old”, if it’s good content that’s evergreen, it should easily stand the test of time!
If you’ve got content that’s highly relevant to trending topics, current affairs, or conversations happening in the media, then I encourage to use them to contribute to the conversation.
The trick to getting traction with this repurposing and resharing method is to choose only the most hyper-relevant points in your content. You want to be adding value, not shoehorning your way into a space you just don’t belong.
This might mean tweaking or editing your original content or sharing only bite-sized repurposed content, rather than linking back to the core, pillar piece.
More content = more opportunities to nail your timing!
Alright, let’s recap the three methods you can use to improve the timing of your content:
- Test your posting times to understand your audience behavior
- Reshare content at different times – the winners and losers (iterate as you go along)
- Contribute to trending topics with your most relevant content
A comprehensive and regular repurposing process will help you with all of this because more content means more opportunities to nail your timing!
If your team needs support with regularly repurposing your content, we can help. Our slick content repurposing services mean we integrate with your existing marketing processes and maximize your content. Find out all about them here.
For more content repurposing tips and advice, check out our resource library of blog posts, podcast episodes, and free downloads. Or, get your hands on the ultimate guide to content repurposing, Content 10x: More Content, Less Time, Maximum Results.