What happens if you recycle all your content for 1 week?

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Hey everyone!

This week I scrapped (again) the usual format to dive deeper into the content experiment I ran this past week.

If you missed it, I talked about recycling your own content as a super valid content creation strategy. And then went and applied it to my own content.

Let’s see what happened!

Time to read: 4 minutes, 34 seconds

Last week on The Steal Club I wrote about recycling your own content and how its something that every person creating content should embrace.

So, in good Steal Club fashion, we took the theory and put it into practice.

That means I recycled ALL my content for the past week.

What do I mean by recycling? If you missed last week’s issue, content recycling is about:

1. Finding your top-performing content from the past
2. Breathing new life into it (make it longer, shorter, ad visuals, new format…)
3. Posting it again

So that’s what I did. For Twitter and Instagram.

Let’s see how that worked out! 

But first, I want to thank our sponsor for today’s email👇

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Twitter is my favorite platform for recycling content. A Tweet's lifespan is short, which seems to be a disadvantage, unless you are a content recycler. 👀

For Twitter, I recycled 6 tweets, 2 visuals and 1 thread. Let’s see some numbers and the how-to:

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

4 months

Changes made?

Tried to tweak the copywriting to make it more direct (see “If you want to…”)

Results

Less likes, RTs and comments than the original. Still it was a solid tweet with good engagement.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

5 months

Changes made?

Nothing. Just copy-pasted the tweet 😅

Results

Fewer likes but more comments. Great number of impressions too!

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️♻️

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

5 months

Changes made?

Nothing. Just copy-pasted the tweet (again)

Results

Less likes and RTs but more comments. I call that a win in my book!

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

5 months

Changes made?

Nothing. Just copy-pasted the tweet (again 😅)

Results

Less likes but similar amount of comments and RTs but more comments.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

5 months

Changes made?

Tweaked the headline for each part of the tweet to make it more general. Perhaps that was a mistake…

Results

This tweet significantly underperformed compared to the original one. Still made for a good piece of content but I expected more to be honest.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️

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Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

7 months

Changes made?

Adequated to current timeframe. Tweaked the months and the January date

Results

Great performance, pretty similar to the first one. It’s a punchy message so I kinda new it would do well.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️♻️

As it turns out, both recycled visuals did worse in terms of engagement than the first time I posted them.

The main reason may be the audience's saturation with this type of content.

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

6 months

Changes made?

Tweaked the tweet’s copy a little bit but nothing crazy.

Results

Fewer likes, comments and RTs. It had a good performance but not so good compared to the original.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️

Recycling type

Twitter → Twitter

Time between posts

6 months

Changes made?

Tweaked the tweet’s copy + changed the tax amount from 20% (original) to 50%

Results

Even if it wasn’t crazy in terms of likes and RTs, this tweet sparked super interesting conversations. This fact compensates for the lack of engagement.

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️

Recycling type

Email → Twitter

Time between posts

3 months

Changes made?

For the thread, instead of taking an older thread of mine posted on Twitter, I decided to use The Steal Club.

Some of the content posted here is definitely thread material, so I decided to go with recycling issue #030. I turned that 600 words essay into this thread.

I barely made any changes, just word adjustments so each tweet stayed into 280 characters.

Results

The thread did quite well. Plus, I took the opportunity to plug the Steal Club at the bottom which added a handful of new subscribers (👋)

Recycling success scale (1 to 3)

♻️♻️♻️

If I’m completely honest, 100% of my Instagram is recycled. It’s usually screenshot tweets + visuals I’ve already posted on Twitter.

But for this week, I went one step further. I reposted content that I already posted on Instagram. 

Below are my 6 latest posts. The ones marked with ♻️  are the re-recycled ones.

The result was great, especially with the “Old way vs New way” visual, which crossed 1k likes.

The first time I posted it it got “only” 280. Some improvement, no?

Same happened with the magnet visual, that 2x the likes it got the first time around.

You might also recognize the top left, tweet, as it’s the repurposed tweet from this week.

So it went from Twitter to Twitter to Instagram. That’s what I call ultra recycling 😆

This past week I spend a bit more than 3h putting together all my content.

2h was to write my newsletter.

1h was to recycle all the content.

So in reality, I spent 1h putting all my social media content together.

After this, I can just reaffirm myself as a loyal advocate for content recycling.

Make your content work for you. Each piece you put out can have an infinite lifetime if you have a recycling strategy in place.

Hopefully with this experiment, I convinced you to do so.

Having that said, you still need to create new content. You can’t live forever by only recycling your content. 

Content recycling is something you can do to complement your content efforts. But it should never be the only thing.

• The exact "micro-article" system Matt used to grow his email list from zero to 2857 subscribers (that generated a 5 figure income in just 90 days) for free and with no paid ads. Check it out.
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• How to Visualize Value. The playbook to create meaningful visual communication. This course is what got me started on my visual journey! Must check.

Some of these links are affiliates

And this is it for now! Let me know what you think about this week's issue by voting here:

• 👍 Worth it
• 😐 Meh - was ok.
• 👎 Not interesting to me

See you next week!

Alex Llull

Thief Master

The Steal Club

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