Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Lazar Bošković, Creative Director, AgitPROP
What can you do with good content? Well repeat it, of course!
This doesn’t apply only to history which, it seems, (constantly) repeats itself. And it doesn’t matter that, while watching local TV programs, we feel like we’re stuck in Groundhog Day. This is a story about the need, and smart practice, to repeat content on the internet when its time comes, because there are always those who didn’t see it in its first run. Of course, this is also a story about content marketing, and the concept of intelligent content, which helps make the preparation of materials easier.
The replaying of content is all around us. What does this look like in the old-fashioned electronic media – radio and television? Almost all commercial radio stations in Serbia base their content on a music list of about 500-600 songs, 15-20% of which change about every two weeks. And most of those specialized cable TV channels, regardless of whether they are film or documentary, have only six hours of program a day, which are then repeated four times in 24 hours. And how many of you actually notice that this happens every day?
Clutter and blurring demand repetition
And what does this look like on our beloved internet? They say that the half-life of posts on social media is about 72 hours. In other words, from the moment it was posted, the content will experience half the total number of its views in the next 72 hours. It will remain in the same place for years, and those initial, let’s say 1,000 views, will increase by another 1,000 in the next X years, because in the meantime it gets overrun by newer posts.
If you have slept through a day, and thus remained offline from the internet, and did not read the papers, or tune-in to radio and TV, you have missed a lot – in terms of numbers – and then again not so much – in terms of meaning. They say that out of the approximately 17,000 pieces of information that we receive daily, at the end of the day we can only remember a few – and fortunately so. Today a person receives more information every day than our ancestors received every month or more a century ago, depending on where and how they lived. In addition to piles of spam, our senses are bombarded with even greater heaps of legal advertising. However, the technology allows us, as never before, to fully or partly ignore the brands and companies that don’t interest us, and official statistics say that more than half of the ads on the internet are never actually seen.
That tells you volumes about the clutter of content. But we are also introducing a new concept – blurring. The fact that everyone has their own screen today – so no one in the family any longer has to watch the same TV screen and one computer – is both good and bad for those who publish media content of any kind. It’s good because now they can accurately target audiences through the gadgets a particular audience likes. It’s bad because they have to produce a lot of different versions of content, tailored to the place, manner and time of publishing. In fact, the real blurring only starts there, because the timing of the broadcast no longer has the same role it used to. Although there is prime time for broadcasting on radio and TV even today, as well as a recommended time for posting on social media, in reality it all looks very different. All of this, in fact, again thanks to technology, we can watch, listen to or read whenever we want and wherever we want.
A small glossary of content terms
All in all, such is the daily amount of content that the average consumer will hardly notice that some of it might be old content that they, for some reason, missed in its first run. Replaying the same content, in identical or modified form, is nothing new, but let’s try to introduce some order into the conceptual guidelines and variants of the process.
Intelligent Content – the concept of the processing of content that allows the simplest preparation of content for re-publication. This is content that is structured and semantically tagged, and therefore searchable, reusable, variable in form and customizable. The story of the concept of intelligent content, however, deserves an article of its own.
Content Reuse – the practice of manual or automated use of existing components of content in different ways, eg using the same photos of the product on the site, in catalogues, in advertisements, in instructions for use…
Reposting Content – publication of the same content in other locations, eg a post from the company blog is repeated on the LinkedIn page of the company. This has to be done carefully, in such a way that it will not endanger the SEO of a company’s website, due to duplication of the same content.
Repurposing Content – adaptation of quality old content that is in demand in a new form, eg making an infographic from an old slideshow presentation.
Content Retargeting – a method in content marketing by which, through repeated advertising, visitors who have already expressed interest in specific content on the first visit to the site are led to come back to it.
Recycling of content for a better rerun
Quality content that is so evergreen that it doesn’t require any finishing touches before rerun is rare. Of course, here we do not mean the literary, music or film classics, but everyday internet content created for predominantly commercial purposes. In fact, even old music and old movies have undergone digital remastering, to remove the crackles of vinyl records and damage marks on film.
Before you decide to repeat any content “from stock”, consider whether it is better for it to undergo a creative or other kind of transformation. OK, you did a good job on the topic in the blog post a few years ago. But it doesn’t take much effort for this post to be adapted into some sort of a guide on the same topic or a podcast. Or you can repack old webinars into video tutorials and so on. There are many ways, but there are few creative content authors. Therein lies your chance to stand out. Or to pay someone who knows how to do it.