Why rewriting and republishing existing content for LinkedIn might be your best strategy in 2022

LinkedIn is the place to go when you want to get straight down to business. There are no hidden marketing tactics just straight-up people promoting themselves and their brands, you either love it or hate it. 

It’s great for new businesses because it enables brands to hire people, teach other people about themselves and increase their reach. 

You will see many teens or freshly graduated young talented adults on there looking for jobs or just exploring their creative side. 

With that being said, there are thousands of new accounts being made on LinkedIn every day. Any of these new users could be a new customer, employee, or fan of your company. So, you don’t want them to miss any old content that you put out! 

Republishing and rewriting old content is nothing new on LinkedIn, it has been done by huge companies and they have found real success with it! 

The easiest way to create high-quality content is by republishing and rewriting it! 

Let’s look at some more reasons why you should consider reusing and repurposing old content…

Increases reach

You can create the perfect post, take a few hours out of your day to curate it, and make sure there are no mistakes within it and it would only be visible to less than 80% of your audience. This is due to time zones and a fixed time limit that users on LinkedIn follow.

LinkedIn, unlike Instagram or Twitter, is a professional work platform, so it’s very natural to only stay there for 15-20 minutes before losing interest. So, because of this, your first post never reached your target audience. So, republish it, rewrite it, and polish it up and you’re good to go! 

It’s more effective

A healthy reminder, you are no longer an individual person, you are in fact a BRAND. Time is money and coming up with new content all the time on LinkedIn is going to cost you a LOT of labor. While repurposing your old posts is also labor intensive, it is nowhere near the cost of new content! No one is going to get bored of your old content, that’s not a thing if you repurpose it correctly! Without putting in much effort, you can get just as much traction on your page! 

More engagement 

Republishing your content gives your audience another opportunity to interact and share your content. Sometimes your audience will get a bird’s eye view of your post, and their timeline refreshes, and they lose it. Republishing and repurposing content will help get more comments, likes, and shares!

Let’s take a look at ways to strategically repurpose your content on LinkedIn

Now that you know why to repurpose your content, let’s take a look at HOW to do it. It would be too easy to say to repeat any post of yours that looks good, copy-paste it, and expect great results but that is just not the case I’m afraid! Here are a few tips on how to do it successfully:

Find suitable content

Suitable content is content that has a great number of shares, is really high in ranking on Google, and is still relevant to your brand. Take a look at the articles that generated backlinks and there you have spotted your perfect content. 

Revise the content 

Oftentimes, creators get way too excited when they find out that you can repurpose old content without any penalties. That should not be the case with you! Putting in less effort does not mean putting in zero effort. So, here are a few points you should consider revising:

• If your target audience has remained the same throughout. If it has changed, make a few tweaks to your post to better fit your new audience
• Update THE FIGURES AND FACTS! This is very important, you will look like a dunce if you reuse the same statistics and analysis when they change all the time. So, update them when you’re revising your posts. 
• Update the keywords, generally, the keywords get outdated really fast and are no longer appropriate for a new post. So, be sure to add a few of the trending ones to keep your post afloat.

Multiple short posts from one really long one

This is a great way to extend a post for a long time. Jot down a post that did well and break it up into a few parts. Take those parts and give them a finishing touch so they appear as independent writing paragraphs and post them! This is great for when you want a break from social media or if you’re busy elsewhere but still need to be consistent online. You can easily break up quite a few posts this way! 

Make one length post from a few posts

Yes, it may sound bizarre but hear me out. If you have 2-3 posts that are around the same topic, sum them up in one place! Change the wording a bit and mix and match them or you can just simply place them as is and edit out the ending to make it into one long post. Totally up to you!

Try a different post format

If you REALLY don’t want to appear like you repurpose old content. You can use a different format! For example, if the first time you published a link to an article on LinkedIn you used an image and placed the link in the caption text, the next time post the link in link format on the platform. 

These are just a few tips to elevate your rewritten content. But this republished and rewritten content can turn against you pretty quickly. 

Especially if you overdo it. Here are some risks of repurposing:

You risk a penalization from Google

You will either learn it early on or learn it the hard way that LinkedIn is no joke. Any funny business and you’re penalized, in fact, you can’t post more than 5 times a week or you risk losing your account! If you over-duplicate your content, your account will be flagged for it! It’s very hard to fight your reputation then! 

Loss in traffic

Continuing to post duplicated or rewritten content is great if you know how to do it right! Or else you will risk a loss in engagement. Your audience just won’t be impressed with your overused content anymore and then eventually, you’ll lose most of them and have to start from scratch! 

Don’t repost every article 

Strictly keep it to the ones that did exceptionally well! You don’t need “more of a bad thing!”. 

Don’t repost your last post

Keep at least a one-post distance between your posts. Reposting your last post wouldn’t introduce anything new to your page and would result in a loss of traffic. 

Don’t just copy paste

You need to edit out a few things before posting. Especially your beginning and ending and analytics which constantly change. 

Optimize your article for traffic and leads

Take this as general advice for ANY article or blog post you will ever write. It’s crucial to optimize your content to appear on search engines and to include links to other content within your article. 

Practicing rewriting can give you the skill to ask yourself: 

• “What’s missing here?”
• “Why didn’t they delve into this?”
• “What needs to be said based on this?”

Improve your headline to make it more attractive using this tool from sharethrough:

Here are a few profiles on LinkedIn that you can view as an example of rewriting and republishing

Liz Ryan

Human resource specialist Liz Ryan: She’s the leader of the “Human Workplace” movement and she speaks about career advice, leadership, and other aspects of the workplace. 

Jill Schlesinger

News Business Analyst Jill Schlesinger: she takes complicated news about the economy and turns them into something entertaining for readers to understand.

Gary Vaynerchuk

CEO of VaynerMedia Gary Vaynerchuk: he often provides his takes about business, communication, and social media strategies — but always with a fresh perspective and unique, opinionated voice.

To conclude:

It’s safe to say that you can rewrite and republish your content on LinkedIn and it usually does pretty well. You do have to follow a couple of rules while doing so, but that is way easier than curating a completely new post from scratch! 

Rewriting and republishing RESPONSIBLY will get you a ton of traction on LinkedIn and your followers will forever remember your post. 

Just remember to not repeat your post, edit it to fit the time frame, change the analytics and give it a finishing touch before reposting! 

However, if you want to extend your time, break up one post into multiple smaller ones to have enough content for a couple of weeks. Be careful of getting flagged on LinkedIn! 

When rewriting your post make sure that you’re not overworking. The idea is to take advantage of what is already done and give it your personal touch through your perspective. 

Practice, practice, practice (and a bit of help from tools like Hypefury) is all you need to become an effective rewriter and an ideas extractor.