Rinse and Repeat Social Media Posts or Not?

Welcome back to another episode. Today, we wanted to talk about repeating content. It’s something that we get asked pretty often by people who use this social tool. I see it a lot too in just different circles of social media management. We’ve heard a lot of people make their case for whether it should be a part of your strategy one way or the other, and it’s just something we wanted to dive in and talk about today on the episode.

It’s a charged topic, so let’s kick it off. A lot of opinions here for sure.

The Case for Repeating Content

Essentially, the idea is that the content that you post gets seen by people, your followers, right then and there. So it’s likely that whenever you are posting stuff, if your followers are online at that point, by the time they are opening up their phone and scrolling down, your content, your post, your video is so much further down their feed. The few scrolls that they do are not enough to see it.

So the argument that people make for repeating content is that you post it once, you hit the people who were there say at 1:00. Then you repeat it at 5:00 and you got those who came from work perusing their social feed. So that sort of is the argument for repeating content. I think over the years we’ve seen a variety of terms used, for instance, Evergreen content, repeated content, recycled content, with an idea of repeating the same exact content more than once.

Who’s Asking for This Feature?

That’s a good question. It really has mainly come out of just feature requests within customer success. We see on our public roadmap people are making the suggestions, and a lot of the conversation, if I could take our listeners through it, is, “Hey, imagine you’re scheduling a post.” Let’s just say this is a text-based post for now, and we can get into maybe the more advanced options and stuff like that too. But just a text-based post, and maybe it’s going over to X, or LinkedIn, or Facebook and you’re going to post it tomorrow at 5. The idea here is that I want to also be able to schedule it the next day at 1, the next day at 5.

The Social Media vs. SEO Mindset

I always felt that that type of request is sort of rooted in a way people understand SEO or web, whereby the amount of content is ultimately what matters. So if only we can produce that many more articles, if only we can create that many more posts to our website, and that would trigger the Google algorithms, the search algorithms to rank us higher, right? But I think the fallacy here is that social media isn’t about the quantity of tweets or the quantity of posts.

Social media is all about relationships, and I don’t think, personally anyways, not that I’m on social much, but I follow. Saying there is a History Channel that I like, I don’t see them posting the same documentary more than once, right? So they’ll post it and I’ll watch it, and then the next day if I get alerts for the same documentary I’ll be kind of curious as to what’s going on, why am I seeing that twice?

Repurposing vs. Repeating

The other side is, are we seeing social media managers, marketers who work for marketing agencies doing this as part of their strategy? I haven’t found that to be the case yet. If they are repurposing, then that’s repurposing, right, which is different than repeating. They’re taking their content that maybe was over on YouTube and they’re repurposing it to Facebook, right? Or they’re repurposing a snippet of a specific, let’s say this podcast, right? And taking a 15-second clip and repurposing it somewhere else.

The Risks of Repeating Content

But then you have this other side of the risks, right? And the risks is that networks will penalize you for repeating content these days, some networks more so than others. For instance, Twitter is adamant, right, that nobody repeats content. Similar content can get you into trouble in other networks, substantially similar content, relatively similar content. The enforcement could be something as low touches maybe so like a shadow banning, and I think we spoke about shadow banning in some prior episodes. Or it could be something as aggressive as full suspensions, right?

The AI Alternative

Maybe it’s just a mental thing, people just like, “Hey, it’s so much easier to schedule something to post 10 times than to create 10 posts.” Yeah, but I mean, I think if we’re going into the realm of AI, then I think the time-saving capabilities of taking this one post and, you know, creating variations, it might be just as time-saving to just create 10 unique posts with AI, right? Or 10 unique captions.

Our Responsibility as Tool Makers

I could always say that there’s a sense of responsibility too, right? As a tool, as developers who are connecting and bridging the social networks to the end users, there’s a certain responsibility that we have to ensure not just the terms of service, but I think in general, the whole ethos of social media is genuine connections, right? Whether it’s connecting people to people, people to brands, brands to brands, whatever you might say.

The Final Verdict

Yeah, you know, maybe I follow within the same camp of not not being a fan, but I think I’m I’m open to being convinced otherwise. Maybe I can go back to that if somebody can just reach out and say, “He here is the strategy I’ve implemented and look, the data shows that it’s working.” I’d love to be proved wrong 100%. I think we can bring it on to this podcast and and interview that person with with the numbers to prove it.

Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you guys again for listening. I think this is like Vitaly said, one of those for sure that we wanted to take online because we’re seeing a lot. If there’s some insights that you have and you’re like you want to contribute to this, move over to our suggestions board and we’ll have a link probably in the show notes or just shoot us an email. We’d love to get some more context, maybe even bring you on to one of the future episodes there as well. Feel free to connect with us on social as well. You can find the links to our socials in the show notes as well. All right, everybody, we’ll see you on the next one. Take care.