A good Facebook™ post should not go into oblivion. Especially if your followers liked, commented and shared the life and soul of it. In a time where relevant metrics are shifting towards engagement, you must make the most of your valuable content.
After all, you cannot be an endless fount of creative and inspirational posts. There are moments when you are busy with other aspects of running your business. Or simply, you cannot find that perfect combination of text and visuals that create emotional responses in your followers.
In these dire circumstances, you could try to stitch together whatever you can – but your followers will notice the lacklustre value of your social media activity. Or you can go back to the most engaging posts on you face in the last few months and repurpose them as Facebook™ ads or other types of promoted posts.
Social Media Memory Is Short and Fleeting
If you worry that your followers will be annoyed by the repetition, rest assured. No matter how enthusiastic they were a few weeks ago about your post, it will soon fade out of their memory. Imagine all the conversations they’ve had with friends in this interval. How many baby photos they liked and loved; how many funny animal videos they shared.
There is so much going on every moment on any given Facebook™ news feed, that even if someone purposely wanted to remember and find your older posts, they would have a hard time reaching them.
These being said, here are some creative and effective ways to reuse your most successful posts as Facebook™ ads or promoted posts:
1. Identify Your Top Performing Posts
The first step is to find the posts that are worth repurposing. And this does not mean going down the memory lane and counting likes and shares for each post. Your page analytics does it for you and gives you a wealth of information.
You will learn whether the post performed better among women or men. You will find the age groups, geographical regions and even the devices used by those who engaged with your post. This information is valuable because it helps you set the first selection criteria for your ad audience.
2. Build Brand Awareness with Social Proof
There are 1,000 ways in which you can say that your brand is amazing, but only one thing really matters: how many people agree with you. So, popular posts that amassed lots of likes, loves, wows, comments and shares are the best candidates for a top of the funnel brand awareness ad.
It can be anything from a video where you present your brand story, to an inspirational blog post in which you wrote the reasons why you decided to open the business. The numbers of engagements will make it believable.
3. Re-edit Your Creative Work
At some point, you want to sell through Facebook™ ads. That is the ultimate purpose of social media advertising, after all. If you are out of inspiration when it comes to creating the visuals, then go to the analytics page and look at your most popular posts.
Somewhere, somehow you will find the video or photo that goes well with your offer. All you have to do is edit it to add a call to action, the price, the discount, or whatever is relevant for the respective ad.
4. Be Careful about Time Sensitive Posts
Not all of your successful posts can be repurposed. If the post is related to a specific, one-time only event, there is nothing you can do. This is one of the reasons why you should focus on evergreen posts and content.
On the other hand, Easter, Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day happen every year. In this case, all you need to do is create ad campaigns at the right moment, reusing appropriate visuals.
5. Bring Your Popular Instagram Photos to Facebook™
As you know, Facebook™ own Instagram and made it very easy to share posts across the two platforms. Repurposing Instagram posts as Facebook™ ads is a very good idea for visually appealing products. It is an unwritten rule that both brands and individual users take greater care to create and edit beautiful images for Instagram.