Your video content is bursting with new opportunities. These assets, when repurposed correctly, can help you generate more content with half the effort.
With repurposing, you can use a single video to create a variety of high-value content assets, in a variety of formats, for a variety of platforms and channels. As a result, you reach more people, and experience higher engagement and growth.
In this guide, we’ll look at 7 effective ways you can repurpose your video content, without having to reinvent the wheel. Let’s dive in.
Jump to a specific section:
- Why You Should Bother Repurposing Your Content
- 7 Ways to Repurpose Video Content
- Video Content Repurposing Best Practices
[#TOC1]Why You Should Bother Repurposing Your Content[#TOC1]
There are a handful of reasons to consider dedicating time to repurposing content for social media and other channels, including:
- Extend Your Content’s Life and Drive the Most ROI from it: Recycling your content into different formats helps you create more content for different channels without you having to invest resources in full content production. Not only does this save you resources but it also helps squeeze the most value from each content piece that you create.
- Content Repurposing is the New Way to Effectively Distribute Content: Content distribution is often thought of as link sharing. But that’s an old, boring way to get more eyeballs to your content. A better, more audience-engaging, and valuable approach to content distribution is sharing the same content in different formats. So, for example, instead of sharing a link to your blog post, you could use it as inspiration to script your next Reel or TikTok.
- Make Your Content More Accessible and Meet Different Audience Segments’ Preferences: Not all the people in your audience prefer consuming the same content format. Some may prefer reading, whereas others may prefer watching videos. Instead of creating new content from scratch, simply change its format (from video to blog posts, for example). This way, you can satiate different audience segments’ appetites for different content formats, making your content more accessible.
[#TOC2]7 Ways to Repurpose Video Content[#TOC2]
Now for which content to take to the recycling board and how to reuse it:
1. Chop a Long Video into Several Short Videos
The easiest way to repurpose video content is to slice and dice a long one into bite-sized clips. In fact, it’s one of the most effective ways to create more content for social media by putting in only half the effort that goes into producing new content from scratch.
Take it from Sprout Social that recycled the content in this video into a short video for Instagram:
Splitting a long video into smaller videos also helps you distribute it better without link spamming. Simply add a CTA that reads ‘learn more about the topic by watching the full video’ to your short-form video and you’ll drive interested viewers to your YouTube channel.
To start slicing your YouTube videos today, head over to VEED to turn your longer videos into shorter videos.
2. Turn Your Video into a Blog Post
You can also create long-form written content for your blog, LinkedIn, and newsletter using your videos.
Your video library is a goldmine for text-based content. Approached with the right editorial mindset, this repurposed content can skyrocket your website’s visibility on search engines like Google and help empower your email campaigns.
Here are some best-practices to keep in mind:
- Pick Your Best-Performing Videos to Repurpose into Blog Posts: Check which of your videos received the most engagement (number of views, comments, shares, etc.). Those are the videos that you should repurpose, as they obviously clicked with your audience.
- Create a Strong Outline for the Blog Post: Use the script of your video and turn it into an outline, with proper sections that connect with each other. It’s important to convey the most important ideas/points as early on as possible, as you don’t have the same luxury of keeping your viewers hooked with visuals like you do in videos. Instead, hook your readers with the most appealing information, and then build on top of it to make sure they make it till the end of your article.
- Fill in the Gaps: Video is a visual medium that requires very little effort to consume, unlike a blog post. With the right combo of voiceover, footage, images, and sound effects and music, you can effectively convey your thoughts while keeping your audience hooked. However, with a text-based medium, like a blog post, it can be a bit challenging explaining exactly what you want to say. To this end, elaborate on your thoughts, and rely on visuals (graphics and videos) to drive your point home.
VEED did just that recently. We took one of our very successful YouTube videos, in which we explain how we were able to garner over 12M views on a YT short, and converted it into a blog post
Since being published, the repurposed blog post has received over 2,600 visitors. Furthermore, despite having a very top-of-funnel topic that has absolutely nothing to do with our product, the blog post has also driven over 100 people into our editor in almost a month.
Here is the video, in case you're interested:
Don’t have access to your video’s script anymore? No problem — with VEED, you can generate subtitles and download your video transcripts in a single click, and effortlessly convert them into blog posts. Read this in-depth guide to learn more.
3. Turn a Series of Successful Short Videos into a Longer Video
If you’ve been creating short videos for your social media, this video repurposing idea is for you.
Begin with reviewing your video analytics to identify which videos are getting the most engagement. Higher impressions and number of likes and comments all indicate your audience enjoyed the topic.
Then, put together a list of topic-wise related videos and head to VEED to merge them into one, long video.
Pro tip: You don’t need to limit yourself to merging bite-sized videos to create a longer one. Instead, create a new video featuring those clips as B-roll footage that supports your storytelling.
4. Turn Your Video Podcast into a Series of Shorter Form Video Posts
One of the best ways to promote and grow a podcast is to repurpose its episodes into shorter clips and share them on different channels. By showing your audience really interesting bits from your episodes (think teasers or highlight reels), you can hook them in and eventually turn them into regular viewers of your podcast.
Here is an example clip by Jason Bradwell, who took a snippet from his podcast episode where his guest shares insights on early-stage marketing.
The key to creating an audience-engaging series of bite-sized videos here is to feature only one valuable insight per video.
If you try to squeeze in a handful of tips in one clip, for example, chances are you’ll lose your audience’s attention as all that information overload can overwhelm them. However, by creating a series of small clips featuring 1-3 tips per video, you can get your viewers to binge-watch your short videos.
It’s also worth keeping in mind here that you can create a video series from both video and audio podcasts. The only difference is that you already have visual content for the former but will have to create graphics for the latter.
5. Slice Your Live Stream into Value-Rich Short Videos
Although there’s typically a lot of value shared in live streams, the life of a live session ends after it’s presented and no amount of marketing can help — after all, people are interested in fresh content.
Repurposing it can, however, help you better market the recording by sharing the value the session packs and get you more engagement on it.
To this end, simply chop the streamed content into short videos covering 1-3 takeaways.
Since you’ll be sharing these bite-sized videos on social media, be sure to add captions to the chopped videos you repurpose.
6. Stitch Together Your Most Successful Sequence of Stories into a Reel, TikTok, or YouTube Short
You can also intentionally use this tactic to test which ideas get the most traction. This is particularly helpful for brands and creators with a large, hyper-engaged audience.
Here’s what to do:
- Start off with creating (and saving) Stories related to a specific topic you think your audience will enjoy.
- From there, track engagement — the reactions and replies your Stories gather.
- If the response is above your average engagement rate, upload them to VEED and merge them (see the steps above or watch how to merge videos with VEED below). This lets you create an audience-approved sequence of videos for TikTok, YouTube Shorts — even Instagram Reels.
7. Compile Your Most Successful Videos into a Series of Playlists
Lastly, save your most successful videos into a playlist on TikTok and YouTube. Or compile them as a guide on Instagram.
Either way, the idea is to give popular videos a permanent home where your viewers can easily find and engage with them.
You can also easily reference these playlists to educate viewers.
For example, a SaaS brand can easily pull up and share a playlist of videos explaining how to use a specific product feature — they can also link to it in their blog posts.
Put simply, creating playlists:
- Gives related videos a home so more people can find and consume them
- Let you share playlists easily with more viewers
- Helps you quickly find and share videos you’re looking for
[#TOC3]Video Content Repurposing Best Practices[#TOC3]
And before we wrap this up, three pointers to keep in mind before diving into video content repurposing:
Not All Content Deserves to Go to the Recycle Bin
Make sure you review your content for engagement and its evergreen nature. From there, decide on repurposing only those pieces that are a hit among your audience.
This is crucial for making sure you aren’t wasting time reformatting content that didn’t resonate with your audience the first time around.
Don’t Sacrifice Repurposed Content’s Quality Over Quantity
Just because you can create a chock-full of content pieces from one video for multiple channels doesn’t mean you should.
Take a value-first approach to reusing video content. This is the only way to make sure each repurposed piece meets your quality standards and packs in easy-to-digest takeaways.
You’ll also want to realistically reevaluate how many content pieces you can repurpose given your team size.
Start with assessing which marketing channels are the most important to your business. Then, determine what type of content appeals to the audience on those channels. Finally, list down content pieces to repurpose and in what ways.
Factor in Each Platform’s Requirements Before Repurposing Content
Study everything from the visuals’ aspect ratio to the type of content that does well on a particular channel before repurposing content for it.
You’ll also want to understand each platform’s audience expectations by spending some time over there. Folks using LinkedIn, for example, love good storytelling. X users, on the other hand, prefer direct and punchy takeaways.
Knowing these differences helps you repurpose content that performs well on different channels — simply by tweaking it the correct way to meet the audience’s expectations well.
Ready to Repurpose?
In a nutshell, video content repurposing can help you create more content for your marketing channels. It’s also the secret behind effective content distribution and driving the most ROI from your high-performing content.
The interesting bit? Repurposing doesn’t have to be a headache. Using a tool like VEED, you can easily:
- Create and edit screen and webcam recorded videos
- Trim, merge, and edit videos to create repurposed videos
- Add subtitles, music, filters, and other design elements to your videos
- Turn written and audio content into videos using templates from our template gallery
- Resize videos you create so each one meets its destination platform’s size requirements
So what are you waiting for? Use VEED today and see how it helps you recycle your content quickly and easily.
