How to Leverage Evergreen Content for more Successful Marketing

Are you working harder or smarter when it comes to your social media marketing?

We see it time and again: business owners and marketing staff working to generate brand new content on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. They rack their brains to write new content, send it out, and then repeat the process. It’s time consuming and can feel very repetitive. It’s not that they’re doing something wrong… but it’s not very efficient or strategic.

Consider this: how much of your content could be useful to share again some time down the road?

If your content and messaging was good the first time — hopefully it was! — do you really have to reinvent the wheel and try to do it over and over again every single time? Or are you making unnecessary work for yourself each marketing cycle? Couldn’t some of the same content be used again next year, or maybe even next quarter?

There’s a difference between hard work (which we definitely value around here at Barker Social) and needlessly spinning your wheels. As with every aspect of your business, efficiency is the key to success and growth. Don’t you want your hard work to be meaningful, rather than caught in inefficient processes?

Social media moves quickly, especially on Twitter, but it’s true on all of the platforms. How many of your followers are likely to actually see each individual social post that you share? The fact is, very few. The social media algorithms see to that, enabling only a limited amount of viewership, even with boosted posts.

Identify Evergreen Content

It’s absolutely reasonable to re-use certain kinds of content. The content you want to isolate is the stuff that isn’t going to expire because it’s not limited to a specific date. If what’s true today will still be true and relevant next month and next year, it’s called “evergreen” content, and there are advantageous ways to use it again.

Take blog posts. Most blog posts are probably evergreen. A good blog post is full of rich, informative content and storytelling. If you took the time to write it in the first place, don’t you want as many people to have a chance to read it as possible?

Whenever your content is non-time sensitive, you could share it again strategically to reach a new audience. There’s also nothing wrong with reminding your original readers of the value-add of content. The internet moves quickly and they’ve likely forgotten it.

So how can you make good use of evergreen content?

If you aren’t already doing so, create a Social Media Library to store and track your evergreen material’s release dates.

How to Create a Social Media Library

There are a variety of tools for storing content, but at Barker Social we also always keep our content libraries in Excel, even when it’s being used in combination with other tools. Here are some directions to create a simple Social Media Library in a spreadsheet:

1. Set up and organize your library.

Create columns in the spreadsheet for each theme, topic, and blog or article. For larger, independent categories, you can start a new tab. Columns or tabs might include:

• Promotional Content
• Curated Content
• Quotes
• Funny/Humorous/Entertaining
• Blog Posts
• Etc.

When we start a new campaign, we invest a large amount of time researching and creating strategic, carefully crafted content for each category. We might start with anywhere from 20 to 100 general engagement hooks, another 20 to 100 promotional hooks, and for every blog post at least 10 to 24 hooks.

2. Return to your library on a regular basis to add new content.

We do a strategic copywriting push every month to add new general content we also add new social media hooks to the library for every new blog post that we write.

Periodically, we also take old library content and freshen it up with adjusted wording, or we create additional hooks by rephrasing or repositioning some of the existing ideas and links in new ways.

3. Recycle and track content from your library.

The content can be pulled from the library and recycled at reasonable intervals; less frequently on Facebook and LinkedIn, and more frequently on Twitter. Record when you use each piece of content. We use a colour system to denote which month the content is used and we highlight each cell the month that it’s shared.

Social Media Library Benefits

Having a social media library allows you to share strategic content without having to reinvent the wheel each time.

Another nice thing about using Excel is that you can include a column to total the length of each hook to ensure that you don’t exceed Twitter’s 140 280 character count*. The formula =len(XY) where X is your column letter and Y is your row number will count the number of characters in a cell.

Identifying your evergreen content and having a social media library streamlines your brand’s overall messaging and creates a more efficient social media marketing system. It allows you to be more strategic about what to focus on when, and it saves you from wasting time and energy trying to produce new content when so many people still haven’t read your original content. You’ll save time and money in the long run.

If you need help to create robust brand content library that’s true to your company’s core message, don’t hesitate to contact us. Whatever your business size or marketing goals, we have a social media package to meet your needs.

*NB: As of November 2017, the character count for Twitter has increased to 280 characters.