One of the challenges you will face as you execute your social media strategy is keeping up with the constant demands for content. From articles to videos to updates, you need a constant stream of content to keep social media working. What if you have a lot of existing content? Can that be reused in social media?

Directly copying and pasting electronic content from your website into social networks is not a good idea as you want to keep your best original content on your sites. However, you can reuse existing content in creative ways to increase your brand’s exposure and find new fans and followers. These methods also help your company with search engine optimization.

1. Rewrite Articles for Social Media

One opportunity is to take existing articles and rewrite them for use in social media. You want content to be at least 50% original before posting it on other sites, to avoid a “duplicate content filter” from Google. This does take some effort to rewrite existing content. There are a number of services you could use to rewrite content including Guru.com and eLance.com. These services allow you to find contract writers to rewrite and edit your content.

We recently worked with a client that had a number of whitepapers they had written for internal and client use which were out of print. None of these whitepapers were available online and they were literally sitting on a shelf unused. We started browsing through them and found the whitepapers were written in 300-500 word sections – perfect for breaking apart into articles! We were able to help the client dissect this content for both their website and their social media efforts. This resulted in a huge increase in traffic to their site and an over 100% increase in their social media following.

For most companies, using existing articles and rewriting them will be one of the easiest ways to find content for their social media campaigns.

2. Make a Video Out of an Article

Video is hot and if you’re not doing it, you’re losing out on a major opportunity to connect with people. You can use your existing content to form the script for a short video to post on your site and on social networks. Video will allow you to connect with an audience you may not have reached before.

Michael Gerber, author of the best selling book E-Myth, has produced a number of videos using other content, such as this one:

Creating a video from your content does not have to cost you a fortune. A handheld HD cam such as the Kodak zi8 will give you HD quality at a low cost. With some simple lights, a studio mic, and a tripod, you can create professional looking videos which your audience will find appealing.

3. Break It Up Into Short Bits for Tweets or Updates

You’re not alone: many people struggle to keep up with their Tweets or Facebook page updates. However, you likely have a great source of content for these status updates existing at your company or on your site. You can take existing content and repurpose it into smaller chunks for Twitter or Facebook.

For example, we could take this article and repurpose this point into a status update for Twitter:

Need a tip for generating new status updates? Repurpose existing #content

You’ll likely find some great little bits of information you can repurpose into status updates. You will also have an opportunity to use these status updates to promote your existing content.

4. Create an Infographic from It

Infographics are easy to understand illustrations of data or complex concepts. We recently created one to illustrate how large social media sites are compared to nations around the world. You can take existing content, data, or surveys and create an infographic that is likely to be shared far and wide by people interesting your brand or niche.

Visual communications are all the rage right now. An effective infographic is useful when it explains something that is difficult with words alone. GOOD Magazine had an excellent infographic to explain the relative size of company bankruptices:

You can clearly tell the relative sizes of the bankruptcies based on this infographic. A good infographic tells a story using graphs, illustrations, tables, and charts.

5. Create Questions and Answers From It

Question and answer sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Quora are an excellent way to connect with people. It is likely a question has been asked that you have an answer for somewhere on your site or in content you have produced. Taking this content and repurposing it into an answer on one of these Q&A sites is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and position in an industry.

6. Write a Short eBook From It

Michael Hyatt, the Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, recently created a free ebook, Creating Your Life Plan, using a number of blog posts he’s written over the years. He explains how he wrote his ebook in a simple post titled How to Create an e-Book in Seven Steps.

Once you have an ebook, you can do a number of things with it. Mr. Hyatt is using it to promote his newsletter and increase subscribers. This is an excellent way to built your email marketing list.

An ebook is a great way to establish your expertise in a topic and find new fans. By using existing content, your time is investment in editing and formatting.

7. Make a Presentation Out of It

You can create a presentation from your existing content. A presentation sharing site such as SlideShare.net or DocShare provide an opportunity to promote your site and social media presence to a new crowd. Both of these sites have tremendous search engine presence and a lot of users, so people may find your presentation and be interested in your products or services.

It’s easy to convert your existing content into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation and both of these sites support these files or PDFs. Converting existing content into a presentation is a unique way to reuse content.

Sharing Your Content

Sharing your content through social media can help you find additional fans and followers and create an audience to market to. Creating original content is a part of your social media strategy, but you should also consider ways to reuse existing content to save time and money and show off what you’re capable of. Using these 7 ideas will help you develop a new following and take advantage of all that social media has to offer.