How to Break Down a Single Blog into 30+ X (Twitter) Posts in < 30 Minutes

‍

Repurposing and distributing content, like a blog post, via your social media channels can be a game-changer for your business and your content program.

The benefits are numerous and range across a number of ideal content marketing goals: 

• Additional traffic and conversions on your website
• New subscribers/followers
• Synced messaging across your marketing channels (email, social, blog, etc.)
• Backlinks that contribute to SEO ranking impact 
• Gaining authority and attention from industry leaders/influencers in your space

The 3 keys to making content distribution efforts successful center around:

1. Consistently sharing important messages over and over again
2. Utilizing different positioning around value so you catch a wider audience over time
3. Convincing people to take the desired action via those distribution channels

This specific blog post is designed to help your content teams work together to ensure that they’re able to efficiently produce a significant amount of Twitter content from 1 particular content asset like a blog. 

This will create months’ or years' worth of social content from a single blog investment (Aka savings in money and time with a significant potential upside)

Here is what we'll be covering below:

Anyone who is on Twitter has seen them. All of us have found ourselves 20 tweets deep into a thread that caught our attention and delivered on its promises.

A Twitter thread is a great tool for evaluating and repurposing content because it:

• Allows you to create a single social post that covers the entirety of a blog topic by connecting 25 tweets together (sometimes more if you’re feeling wild)

• Forces you to identify the most valuable parts of a blog post in order to distill sections into single tweets

• Demands you distill those valuable parts into the most concise versions of themselves in order to stay within Twitter’s strict character limits

• Empowers each Tweet that is a complete thought to be used as individual tweets at a later date and as posts on other social media channels

• Illuminates sections of a blog that might be necessary to the narrative but currently lack actionable tips, examples, and other value ads that a reader will benefit from

• Provides a low-effort way for the industry experts and readers who engage with your posts to amplify them to their followers via a retweet

• Gives your information to readers for free without forcing them onto your website, yet allows you to invite them to click on your URL for a better reading experience if they’re interested

The reason we’re suggesting that this format will change the way you might think about ALL your content marketing is it is a good representation of completing the conversations you’re having with your readers.

For example, let’s suppose you create a blog post (and then a thread) about 10 effective content marketing strategies. In that thread, each tweet mentions the value of one specific strategy and an actionable best practice.

If each of those strategies is important for your audience to know in order to be better versions of their professional selves, then you should create an individual blog post for each of those strategies. And those blog posts will become their own threads. And the individual topics within those threads that are valuable can become their own blog posts. Etc.

Rather than creating a bunch of blog posts about disparate topics, you’re focusing on completing the entirety of a thorough and rich conversation.

And that focus will allow you to build out a site with good information architecture (pillars and clusters) and intuitive internal linking structures that your SEO team will thank you for. And Google will reward your authoritative efforts with the rankings you’re invested in having.

How to break down a blog post for Twitter distribution

Below we’re going to walk you through an example of exactly how you can break a single blog post down into social media posts. We’ll specifically be looking at how to create LinkedIn and Twitter posts, but the general principle scales across multiple social platforms.

Before we get too far along, I want to introduce an example of a Ten Speed blog article for us to center this conversation around. This should give us all a reference point that makes following along much easier.

For the remainder of this post, we’ll be looking at the following blog post on our website:

An Anchor Text User Guide: What It Is, SEO Best Practices and Strategic Uses

Additionally, there are tools on the market that will allow you to more conveniently create and format threads so you don’t have to type them out a single Tweet at a time. For this post, the images we used are from the tool, Typefully.

To start, it’s helpful to take the 50,000-foot view of your blog post. This means taking stock of your headers and the overall outline to understand the narrative flow of your content. You can also look to your table of contents for help.

Let’s look at those things for our example post:

• H1 - An Anchor Text User Guide: What It Is, SEO Best Practices and Strategic Uses
• H2 - TL;DR Anchor Text Overview
• H2 - What is anchor text
• H3 - <a href> HTML code sample - where the anchor text sits
• H3 - What is the value of anchor text in links?
• H4 - 1. It’s great for user experience (UX)
• H4 - 2. Anchor text provides context clues to Google and other search engines
• H4 - 3. This can be a great way to assign keywords to your content
• H4 - 4. It MIGHT be part of a ranking factor
• H2 - Different types of anchor text most commonly used
• H3 - 1) Exact-match anchor text
• H3 - 2) Partial-match
• H3 - 3) Branded link text
• H3 -4) Naked links (URLs as anchors)
• H3 - 5) Generic and random (the majority of hyperlinked text)
• H3 - 6) Alt attributes for images
• H3 - 7) Fraggles and anchor linking for sitelinks on the SERP
• H2 - Google’s Penguin update regulates anchor text
• H2 - Practical anchor text best practices and strategies for SEO
• H3 - Start by simply using anchor text in the first place
• H3 - Use “succinct” anchor text
• H3 - Target page topic relevance
• H3 - Mix up your anchor text approach for a natural distribution ratio
• H3 - Give your arch nemesis credit... but not too much credit
• H3 - Add “exact title matching” anchors or “parent to child page” navigation menus

The first thing you should notice is that there are 25 headers here. That’s perfect. That’s one thread outline and we’re about 30 seconds into our breakdown (image below).

Thread #1 Outline:

The second thing I notice is that there are several headers that introduce lists. Those can become their own threads for a later date and bring our total posts to 4 threads from this one blog post (image below).

3 More Outlines:

‍

Next we’re going to fill in the actual outlines with the content from each section that provides the biggest “bang for the buck.” 

To do this best, ask yourself what the reader needs to know from each section and begin copying and pasting sentences from the blog into each individual tweet. 

Pro Tip: If at any time, there is a dense section that will benefit from being 2 or 3 tweets long, that is absolutely fine. Attempting to distill it into 1 is a mechanism to make you stretch your creative skills, but take liberties as you must in order to deliver the important ideas.

Examples for filling out a tweet:

Example 1: The introduction

To start the thread, I really like this intro paragraph to kick things off and tease the reader into what they can expect in the actual thread themselves (image below).

So we copy and paste that into our tool. You’ll notice that our text is too long. We’ll need to do some crafty editing to trim it by 138 characters.

‍

‍

The final result looks something like this:

You could even dress it up with some emojis to grab people’s attention:

Example 2: The definition plus a helpful image

For the definition Tweet here, I’m drawn to the concise definition options that I have on the page as well as an opportunity to insert that picture of the HTML element for links so readers have a visual cue to see.

After some copying and pasting, we have a tweet that looks like this.

We can refine that down. This isn’t a blog post so we’ll remove the initial question header we had in the piece. Now we’re left with:

Example 3: An individual list item:

If you scroll down our example blog you’ll come to one of the headers “Use ‘succinct’ anchor text.” It’s one of our list items under the broader section about best practices and strategies when implementing anchor text.

In this context, I want to explain what that header means. We also provide some great value-add examples that help the reader better understand the range of acceptable lengths that are perfectly acceptable for their own anchor text.

Here is what we have after some copying and pasting.

We’re quite a bit over the character limit. Let’s allow ourselves to turn it into two separate Tweets, and sharpen how concise it is. 

Here is the final draft:

As you fill out the individual header sections, notice that each of those sections can often but not always act as standalone social media posts as well.

Examples 2 and 3 above are themselves complete thoughts. They likely can be used as individual tweets/posts themselves for quick educational posts. Example 1, however, isn’t a complete thought. 

That means that the main thread contains 24 other individual tweets as well that you could simply repurpose for a future social share.

The first tweet in a thread needs to have a hook. 

It’s that phrase that draws people in and tells the reader what they’re going to learn. As you get more comfortable with it, you might even attempt to surprise your reader with a strong stance and bold promises.

For a great understanding of this format, check out Sparktoro’s:Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content

Here are several examples of successful hooks Twitter:

If people are interested in your Tweets, especially your thread content topics, provide a CTA link where they can learn more by jumping on your website and exploring the actual blog post itself. 

This does several things for you:

• Makes your blog content relevant again
• Sets up an opportunity for someone to convert into a subscriber
• Sets up an opportunity for someone to convert into a customer
• Sets up the opportunity for further amplification and linking to your content

We strongly recommend that your social media team thinks about when it is and is NOT appropriate to link back to original posts. Sometimes the act of repurposing a message without asking a reader to jump from a social platform back to your website is appreciated by your audience (and the algorithm). Don't be afraid to give your reader the full value where they're at by mixing up your tactics.

Once you have your initial thread laid, you can publish into the Twitterverse. Below is a version we landed on for the anchor text post. You’ll notice that while I did an overview of the entire post, I shortened it down into the parts that I thought were most valuable (using what I know about my audience).

‍

Link to the published Twitter thread for reference: https://twitter.com/I___DEREKflint/status/1502287408875773953?s=20&t=UsgLiA32b8nQoxjPRCcMRg 

By filling out our initial tweet we were able to come up with 4 threads. 1 entire blog overview plus 3 listicle threads. (4)

Oftentimes, people respond well to single tweets that are the headers of just a list (example image below). And we know that we have at least 3 of those. (3)

The TL;DR section can make for its own thread. (1)

If we fill in each individual tweet so that it becomes a complete thought/statement (minus the top tweet) - that’s another 24 posts. (24)

That means in approximately 30-35 minutes, we’ve come up with 32 Twitter posts from a single blog post. All of those can be used in the service of pushing people back to the website that cares about this topic. Or they can simply be leveraged to ensure consistency of conversation topics and visible authority.

And that doesn’t even get into rearranging this thread and posting it again, comparing terms in this thread such as (exact-match keyword anchor text vs partial match text), and other creative means of copying and pasting examples or quotes from the blog post.

32 posts =

• 1 post per month for 32 months (2 years and 8 months)
• 1 post every 2 weeks for 62 weeks (1 year and 10 weeks)
• 1 post every week for 32 weeks (7-8 months)
• 1 post per day for a month

You likely have 10s, 100s, or 1000s depending on how long your company has been blogging. This means doing this simple exercise 1 time will give you years of Twitter posts for that one blog. 

And that’s before you’ve invested in video, imagery, or any other type of media options.

Learn more about content repurposing and distribution efforts on the Ten Speed blog

For more on content marketing, SEO, and the art of using your content to it’s fullest potential, bookmark our blog as we release more content.You can also find us on YouTube and LinkedIn for even more actionable advice for content marketing professionals like yourself.

Recommended Readings for Additional Repurposing Efforts:

Yes, You Should Be Repurposing Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started & Expand Your Reach]
‍
How To Create a Never-Ending Supply of LinkedIn Posts By Repurposing Your Blogs [+ Examples]