The Social Media Content Treadmill Trap
Most new creators focus on creating content for the wrong platforms.
They spend their days putting out content for Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
They bust their butts, creating new content every day, but it’s never enough to satisfy the social media algorithms.
Eventually, creators realize they’re stuck on an endless content creation treadmill.
They have to keep publishing content daily just to stay on the algorithm’s good side and avoid losing the audience they’ve built on the platform.
This is exhausting and unsustainable and will lead to creator burnout.
The problem is that they’re focusing on creating content for platforms that have a very short content lifespan.
Low ROI vs. High ROI Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are excellent at distributing your content and ideas to new audiences.
They have a large audience, and their algorithm is designed to make content go viral.
But if you’re not careful, instead of you using social media for your goals, social media can end up using you for theirs.
The secret to becoming the master of social media is understanding which platforms you should put most of your focus on.
To do this, we must separate the different platforms into low-ROI and high ROI:
Low ROI platforms are ones where content has a short lifespan.
High ROI platforms are ones where content has a longer lifespan.
For example, if you publish a tweet, it might get shown to others for 1-2 days. But, if you publish an article or a blog post, it might get traffic for the next 2-5 YEARS!
That’s a huge difference in ROI!
You have limited time and a steep learning curve as a new creator. There’s no way you can do everything.
You must prioritize creating content for the highest ROI platforms first.
Understanding Social Media Return-On-Investment
Here are the platforms with the highest ROI:
- Your Blog – Thanks to the power of SEO, a single blog post can rank and bring in floods of targeted traffic for a long time.
- YouTube – YouTube is known for recommending videos from 2-3 years ago in their sidebar or search results. If you create a great video, it can continue to get views for a few years.
- Medium – Medium is a platform focused on quality writing. When you publish an article on an evergreen topic, you’re creating a digital asset that can bring in traffic for the indefinite future.
The beauty of these high ROI platforms is that you do the work once for every new piece of content you create, but it can continue to bring you traffic for many years.
This is in direct contrast to the lower ROI platforms:
- TikTok
- Linked In
While these platforms are great for their viral potential, the posts you publish will have a lifespan of 2-3 days. (Instagram Reels and TikToks are the exceptions because a viral piece of content can continue to get views for months.)
If you want to make content creation sustainable and enjoyable, you must focus the majority of your efforts on creating high ROI content first. You can then use the magic of repurposing content to publish content to the lower ROI platforms to increase your reach and exposure.
How to Repurpose Your Content for Social Media
So, you’ve taken my advice and focused on the high ROI platforms.
You’ve written an article, recorded a video, or published a YouTube video.
You put in the hard work.
You spent a lot of time trying to make it great.
And now, you’ve got a brand new, shiny piece of content.
What now?
If you are not repurposing each piece of content for multiple platforms, you are throwing away your time and efforts.
You’ve already done the hard work of creating great content—why not get all you can out of it by distributing it to multiple platforms?
Content Repurposing Step-By-Step
For me, everything starts with writing a blog post, but you might start with recording a video or an audio podcast.
Whatever format you use, the basic idea is the same:
Start by creating content for a high ROI platform (YouTube, Blog Post, Medium). Then, repurpose, edit, and repost it to the lower ROI platforms.
Once your pillar piece of content is ready, here’s how to repurpose it for the different platforms:
- Publish your article to your blog
- Publish your article to Medium (use the canonical link to point to your blog as the source for SEO)
- Record a video using the talking points from the article and publish it on YouTube
- Reformat the article slightly and publish it on LinkedIn
- Reformat the article into a Thread format and post it on Twitter
- Go through the article and find short quotes—use them as tweets or Instagram quote posts.
- Take screenshots of the Twitter Thread and create a carousel for Instagram and LinkedIn.
- Go through your video and cut a couple of 30-second segments you feel are valuable—post these on Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Extract the audio from your video and upload it as a podcast episode.
If you (or your team) do all of this, you’ll end up with at least 20-30 pieces of content you can use across the different social media platforms.
Keep in mind that this process is still time-consuming, so if you’re just starting, I wouldn’t recommend you try to do all of this at once. Instead, choose a couple of platforms you want to focus on, and apply this strategy to those platforms.
As your business grows, you can pay someone else to do this for you. (One of the services I offer to some of my clients is content repurposing—feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more.)
This frees you up to focus on the high-level, meaningful work while someone else takes care of essentially growing your social media on autopilot.
You create a single piece of high ROI pillar content, and it automatically cuts it up and posts it on all your social media platforms.
This allows you to leverage the social media algorithms without becoming consumed by them.
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