The more often you create fresh content and post consistently, the more likely you are to grow your social media audience engagement. 

But you only have so many hours in the day and promoting your Toastmasters club is a volunteer gig.

What’s a hard-working Toastmaster to do? 

Share your social media content more than once!

When you,

• create a content sharing calendar,
• add variety to your posts, and
• use the scheduling options,

your posts will come across as fresh content, without a lot of hard effort on your part.

To start, your first step is to create a content sharing calendar.

1) Content sharing calendar.

Your goal is to repurpose your content and spread it across multiple platforms

Let’s say you gave an educational speech at your club from the Toastmasters Better Speaker series.  Your content sharing calendar might look like this:

• Your club has a blog on its website,
  • Write and publish a blog article about what you spoke about
    • if you have a real-world example where you applied one of the principles from your educational speech, write another blog post incorporating your example
    • social media message when each blog post goes live  

• Your club has a monthly newsletter that gets emailed to past and current members,
  • If you had three talking points in your speech and in your first blog.
    • re-purpose each point as separate, shorter, newsletter article. 
    • link your newsletter article back to your blog, so your reader can go somewhere for more information (thus driving traffic to the club’s website).
    • social media message each time a newsletter is published

• Each speech talking point can be re-purposed as separate social media post.  Let’s say you had 3 talking points in your speech and in your first blog (lets call this “Blog A”), and one talking point in your second blog (lets call this “Blog B”).  and for this example, let’s say your club uses 3 platforms:  LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

This is what this first week of re-posting would look like:

• Week 1:
  • for LinkedIn, repurpose your talking point #1 from Blog A into a professional development how-to or tip.  Add a corresponding image and a link to your website.
  • for Twitter, write a shorter version of what you posted on LinkedIn, add image, a link to your website, and schedule it to go out a day or two later.
  • in a more casual tone then seen on LinkedIn, re-word your talking point #1 as a Facebook post; add image, a link to your website, and schedule it to go out a day or two after your tweet.

• Do the same for talking points #2 and #3 from Blog A for weeks 2 and 3.
  • Do the same for Blog B.  Pick one of your talking points for posts for weeks 1, 2 and 3.

So from one educational speech, you’ve re-purposed your content at least 21 times!

Once you’ve defined what works for your target audience and your club’s social media platforms, map out a posting timeline that gives you an ‘at a glance’ overview of your content schedule.

Let’s use the above example but add the three social media platforms to both Blog A and Blog B rollouts, and a newsletter rollout for a 30-day period

When re-purposing content, ensure each post appears unique from your other posts by reshaping the message and changing up the image. You want to give your audience added value with your posting.

How do you make repurposed posts unique?

2) Add variety to your posts.

Posts with images are the first thing the viewers will notice. When using images, its okay to post a similar image for each but avoid posting the same image for the same message across platforms. 

When adding content, switch up the format.  For example, ask a rhetorical question in one post, add a quote from your speech in another, and make a strong statement for the next post.  Switch it up by using bullets points, bolding some of the text to make key words stand out, or inviting people to comment.

Be strategic with your calendar.  Avoid sending the same messages immediately after one another, such as posting all on the same day, or your posts won’t come across as new with fresh content.  Don’t assume that your LinkedIn followers don’t also follow you on Twitter or your other social media platforms.

3) Use the scheduling options.

Some of the platforms have an option to schedule posts in advance.  Take advantage of these features and spend a rainy morning populating posts in advance.  When you schedule several weeks worth in one sitting, your only task for the rest of the month is watch over the activity, like, comment or share as needed, and monitor your platform’s matrix.   If you notice a decrease in activity, analyze the analytics to see what’s going on and make adjustments as needed.  

We know that the more often you create fresh content and post consistently, the more likely you are to grow your social media audience engagement.

When you,

• create a content sharing calendar,
• add variety to your posts, and
• use the scheduling options,

your posts will come across as fresh content, without a lot of hard effort on your part.

By strategically repurposing your content and sharing it across your social media platform more than once, you will find that you can stretch out your original post without needing to spend eons in front of your computer, thus freeing up your time for your Toastmasters speech practise!   

What success have you seen with your Social media strategy?  Let us know! Send an email to publicrelationsmanager@toastmasters86.org

Created by Nancy Movrin DTM Public Relations Manager 2021 – 2022