How To Use One Idea On Multiple Sites Without Duplicate Content: Social Media Mash-Ups

Effective marketing requires more and more content as different platforms become available. It can exhaust your creativity and monopolize your time. As a small business owner, you can’t afford the overhead required to hire a full time team of marketers to cover all the bases. What can you do?

“Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.”

social media mashup-ups

You’ve heard the old saying, but what does that look like for you and your content creation? You know that duplicate content hurts your website in the eyes of the search engines, so you’ve been struggling to create unique content for all of your social media platforms. As a result, you find yourself stretched thin and having to choose between taking care of your current customers and finding new leads via social media.

Sound familiar?

You need to develop some social media marketing mash-ups!

What’s a Mash-up?

Mash-ups are when a musician blends two or more different songs together to create something new. Perhaps you’ve heard a DJ do a mash-up at a wedding or seen it on a movie like Pitch Perfect. The musicians are using what’s already been created to make something else.

Let me explain. We’ll begin with something fairly simple: a blog post.

Starting With a Blog Post

blog-post

You’ve written a great blog post and put it on the company website. Is that all you can do with it? The answer is no. You can share that post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Google+ to reach a wider audience. Did you include an image with the post? (Pro tip: that’s definitely a best practice for blogging.) Pin it to a relevant board on your Pinterest account.

Let’s take it a step further. Can you think of a way to use that same content in a video? If you had to give a presentation with that content, what would it look like? Could you do the same presentation in front of a camera and post it to your YouTube channel? The MOZ Blog has perfected this idea with their Whiteboard Friday posts.

 Recapping. You wrote one high quality blog post, shared it on five social media sites and used it as the basis for a new video. You’re starting to get the hang of mash-ups.

Starting With a Podcast

podcastLet’s try another one. This time we’ll start with a podcast. Maybe you prefer talking to writing, so podcasts are less time-consuming for you. Great. Let’s work with that. After you record the podcast and upload it, what else can you do with it to get it to a broader audience?

You can link to it on Facebook and Twitter with a catchy introduction that fits with your audience there. You could have the content of the podcast transcribed and edited so you can post it on your LinkedIn profile. If the content lends itself to illustration, it could be transformed into an Infographic and posted on Instagram or Pinterest. What if, while you recorded the podcast, somebody on your team shot a video of you talking? Now you’ve got a YouTube video, too.

Recapping. You started with the content for a podcast, linked to it on two social media sites, created an Infographic for a third site, posted the transcript on LinkedIn and uploaded a video to YouTube.

Are you beginning to see how this kind of thinking can help you to maximize one great idea by using it on multiple platforms?

One more example before we move on to some pro tips.

Starting With a Webinar

webinar

This time we’re going to start with the content you’ve created for a webinar. You’ve created the content for the webinar as a free resource for those who filled out an opt-in form on your website. (Good thinking!)

In preparation for the webinar, you put the content into a PowerPoint presentation. You’ve also decided to use your Google+ account and hold the webinar as a Google hangout to keep the cost down and make it as easy as possible for your attendees. By recording the hangout, you are automatically producing a video you can post on YouTube later.

As a bonus, you can use any good questions your attendees ask as the basis for future content creation. After the webinar, you decide to upload the PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare in hopes of directing more traffic to your site.

Recapping. You prepared for one webinar, added to your email list with opt-ins, added connections on Google+, made a video for YouTube, uploaded to SlideShare and came away with ideas for more content. All in all a successful endeavor, wouldn’t you say?

I think you’ve got the hang of mash-ups now. Here are some things to keep in mind as you go.

Pro Tips for Social Media Mash-ups 

  • Don’t just post links on Facebook and Twitter. If you really want to peak interest, use a great quote from the content before you link to it.
  • Duplicate content hurts your website in the search engine rankings. Refrain from posting the same content on your blog that you post on LinkedIn.
  • Keep your audience in mind. You may need to tweak some of your content in order to meet your audience of different platforms. The goal is to reach different audiences, but people who read posts on LinkedIn may be different than people who follow you on Pinterest. Mash-up accordingly.
  • If you don’t have a target audience presence on a certain social media site, focus on other sites instead. Let your buyer persona work for you.
  • Don’t try to do it all yourself. Graphic designers, photographers, video editors and writers on your team can adapt your content for various platforms.

I saved the best pro tip for last…

You can always hire a virtual team of professionals to create and manage the content for you. We’d be glad to help. Schedule a free consultation today.

2 thoughts on “How To Use One Idea On Multiple Sites Without Duplicate Content: Social Media Mash-Ups”

  1. Nicole: Thanks for giving me as a long-time blogger (started 2002) and podcaster (started 2006) ideas for mash-up material. Is the name of the tech & social media site, Mashable, coming from this mixing of content?

    Reply

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