we can help
You might be wondering why an SEO and content marketing agency continues publishing content that asks you to break down and distribute your blog posts.
The answer is simple. Perfecting the art of repurposing and continuously distributing content helps everyone succeed.
Here’s how:
- Distributed blogs pull more readers into your website giving your content teams more behavioral data from customers/leads.
- Distributing content with a link to the original source means more people are interacting with your site AND are sharing the link to their own networks/on their blogs (SEO benefits via backlinks).
- A single blog post is often a mixture of tactics, strategies, thought leadership quotes, and concrete examples – each of these is still useful when distributed apart from the whole.
- Marketing flywheels require leads to interact with your brand across multiple channels – by repurposing your blogs, you’re keeping the messaging the same across social media, the website, email campaigns, and paid advertising efforts.
- Repurposing, especially for LinkedIn, means you’re using the full value of your content while also allowing your Social Media Manager to efficiently impress and entertain your followers.
- Employees are a big part of a company’s engagement success on LinkedIn. By utilizing the messaging in your blogs, you know they’re sharing aligned messaging with your brand.
For the “how-to” explainer section below, we’re going to break down the following URL to illustrate just how much LinkedIn content lives in a single post:
What Is Content Decay? How To Identify & Fix To Unlock Organic Growth
Table of contents:
Before we jump into the instructional part of this blog post, it will be helpful to think about the way LinkedIn requires us to create posts.
We’ve put together a list of guidelines that will be helpful to remember:
✅ Images can’t be used throughout the entirety of the post. They appear at the bottom of it. And while you can post multiple images, you’ll need to think about the overall UX of this experience for a reader.
Do the images you’ve selected enhance the whole post that you’ve created?
✅ Including links in a post has two controversial impacts.
- Posts with links in the actual LinkedIn post SEEM to receive fewer impressions despite LinkedIn saying this isn’t true. For this reason, you’ll often see links included in the comment section.
- Any links included will become short URLs that mask all context clues for where someone might be directed should they click on the URL.
✅ The best posts utilize a strong hook within the first 2 to 3 lines. With some clever line breaks and possibly an emoji, you can get people to expand and engage with your full posts.
✅ Try out a couple relevant hashtags (1-5 max) and try working them through the copy naturally. This won’t always be possible but it can seem less like a “marketing” post when there isn’t a spammy list of 20 hashtags at the very bottom.
✅ Don’t forget to add in @ tags for people and companies that you reference. This puts you into position to get their attention and possibly receive amplification from their interaction with your post.
✅ Choosing the most successful length for a LinkedIn post is more about who you or your brand have attracted based on your typical post style.
Some people have inadvertently taught their audience to love punchy, short posts from them. Other people have attracted followers and connections that expect novels. You’ll need to assess what you can get away with based on this rather than a universal rule.
If you’re thinking about going with the long-form post, we can confidently recommend utilizing emojis, bullets, hyphens, etc. in combination with shorter paragraphs as a starting point. This should help the reader feel a sense of ease and accomplishment plus create visual stimulation.
✅ If you’re trying to tell a more visual story, consider using a LinkedIn carousel by uploading a curated PDF/presentation document that does a nice job summarizing your entire post (or part of your post).
Similar to how we started the article on breaking down a blog post for Twitter, it’s helpful to zoom out and look at the entirety of a blog post.
While a long-form blog’s entire story arc is tough to fit into a single LinkedIn post, we recommend keeping an eye out for lists or overview headers with multiple subsections. They often contain words in them like:
- “Best Practices…”
- “Strategies…”
- “Reasons…”
- “Benefits of…” or “Advantages…”
- “Pros…” or “Cons…”
- “# Examples...”
- “Why...”
- “Steps...”
- “How to...”
- “Types of…”
- “Ways to…”
- “Tips…”
If we go back to our example blog post about content decay, let’s observe the headers from that post:
The 8 highlighted headers all communicate to us that a “list” of answers should appear below. Here are a couple of examples of some very basic outlines:
These list-style LinkedIn posts (with perhaps a bit of style can suffice on their own) or be filled out. If we have 8 potential lists + 8 potential lists with filled-in content, then we’re already up to 16 potential LinkedIn posts.
Additionally, there are 39 headers in our example blog. Each of those can easily become a solo LinkedIn post as well.
We’ll walk you through how to build these out as well in the next section.
For any of the LinkedIn list posts, you can quickly copy and paste blog content from each section to help you fill it out with value-add copy.
This helps bring in additional examples, thought leadership, or further explanations. It should also help give your content a more thorough/informative feel for your readers that prefer that type of content.
Example of filling out a LinkedIn list post:
Here is a recent LinkedIn post related to the “Stages of the content life cycle.” Follow along with our example blog post (you can find it here). We’ll start with the list outline.
To start, go immediately to the main header and see what type of introduction you find on the actual blog post. I thought the one we had, sounded clear and authoritative so I pasted it in (See image below).
Now notice that there are several ways to make a social post more appealing than a block of paragraph text.
Trying cutting out unnecessarily wordy phrases, change written-out number words (one hundred) into actual numbers (100), apply emojis, and separate sentences appropriately.
Then we continued to do that throughout each section – always keeping what is most valuable aspects written very succinctly. Notice the inclusion of additional lists, the use of hyphens, and added descriptions.
Now repeat that until your LinkedIn post feels as though its copy reaches a conclusion that is satisfying for your readers.
Example of filling out a LinkedIn post from a single section of the blog
For an example of using a single section, let’s grab one of our headers from above to build out a LinkedIn post.
Copy and paste your section into LinkedIn.
For the hook, let’s use some of our context clues about this section. The header, “Decline in search visibility,” is a part of a list of ways in which content decay can impact organic traffic and SEO results.
A useful hook might be something like:
Now you could add additional visual appeal with a graph showcasing GSC data of a blog URL in decline, a screenshot of keyword research tool showing keywords losing positions, of a quick video explainer, or leave it as is.
Setting the right hook for your readers is critical to capturing their interest. We’ll do this best by promising useful information or perhaps baiting them a bit with something they might not think they’d agree with (but after an explanation they will).
The reason your hook is important is that it might be the only part of a post that your connections see. If it doesn’t catch their attention, then they’re scrolling on by. If it grabs them, they click it, and the post will expand and reward you for your hard work.
Speak to your target audience
For our “Stages of the content life cycle” post, we are going to address a common industry hurdle for content marketers. A lot of managers and agencies struggle to get approval to address content decay because companies often don’t want to update old posts. New often feels better from their side of the investment.
This is also coming from my personal account. Many of my followers are typically freelancers, and agency-side SEO/content professionals. So I’m going to speak to this audience.
Notice that we’re telling the audience exactly what they’re about to get if they continue reading and how it’s going to help them do their jobs the way they want to. We also include an emoji for some visual appeal as well as the brackets “[]”.
Examples of other hooks found in the wild
Whether or not you include a link to the original post or if you just simply use the post as engaging copy that generates more followers, likes, and shares is entirely up to you.
If your goals are to move people onto your website, then, by all means, try out some best practices for getting people to click the link to your blog.
People do fatigue or grow skeptical about clicking into other people’s blogs, especially if the headline doesn’t move them. For this reason, we recommend occasionally linking back to your blog from the comment section. Other times it’s important to give away your opinions/knowledge without asking people to do anything.
Once you’ve curated your posts, either save them somewhere for later or publish them for the world to see.
You can see the full LinkedIn post that was created above if you visit the following link (below the image):
How much LinkedIn distribution material did we produce from a single blog?
To recap, we identified 8 potential headers that could quickly become lists. (8)
We could leave those lists as a quick bulleted post, AND we could fill those lists out with more detail under each item on the list. That’s 8 more potential list-stye posts. (8)
We have 39 headers that can all become their own posts as well. We showcased how to build those out in our example section. (39)
That means, for our example:
- 1 blog = 55 LinkedIn posts
At various distribution rates, 55 posts is:
- 1 LinkedIn post per month = 4.58 years worth of distribution
- 2 LinkedIn posts per month = 2.29 years worth of distribution
- 1 LinkedIn post per week = 1.06 years worth of distribution
- 1 LinkedIn post per day = 1.83 months worth of distribution
Get the full value out of your blog content with social media distribution
If you found this post helpful, pass it along to your Social Media Manager, paste the link into your slack channels, or keep it bookmarked for yourself.
For continuous information on content marketing and SEO, you can subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on our latest posts and podcasts.
And be sure to follow us on LinkedIn or YouTube.
Recommended Reading: Yes, You Should Be Repurposing Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started & Expand Your Reach]
Discover how we can help.
Book a call with us and we’ll learn all about your company and goals.
If there’s a fit, we will put together a proposal for you that highlights your opportunity and includes our strategic recommendations.