Friday, 15 October 2010 07:35

Where has your content been hiding?

In previous blog updates we have touched on the importance of social media and essentially the use of content. It all sounds wonderful and easy until it comes to writing or redefining your company's content. Most small and mid-sized companies struggle with this idea because content is a resource-intensive strategy and few businesses have those resources to generate a large quantity of content. Well we may have the answer for you small and mid-sized business owners in three simple steps: re-purpose, repackage, and recycle your content! Easy as one, two, and three!

Before you sit down to brainstorm new content, take a look at what already exists within your company walls. Chances are that you'll discover you have a lot more than you were aware of. Take a look at material such as speeches and papers for trade shows, market research, proposals, etc. Documents similar to these are have great information for re-purposing. So what to do once you've tossed out useless information that you may not need anymore? It's simple, allocate your newly found information into categories of different content topics that are cross-referenced with media outlets. This will help you visualize where it will be most beneficial for you to reuse the information.

This brings me to our next step of repackaging our information. It's really as easy as it sounds.... take the information you have, edit and reformat it, and distribute it to a new form of media. An example of this could be taking a previous speech and creating a blog entry with it or posting a webinar recording on your media page.

Finally, it is important to recycle your content. People often have the idea that repeating information is a bad technique, when in fact it can be very useful. The only key factor with this idea is to ensure that your content is relevant to your readers, customers, industry, or market. It is OK to rewrite a topic in a blog or use that blog entry as a highlight on Facebook because it is ultimately your goal to get that information out there for as many people to see.

So next time you are thinking about creating new content to take the next step in business, look at what you already have and recreate it into something new! If you feel you don't have the time or skills to do so, you can always come and knock on our door here at FiG!