Updating and repurposing your marketing assets is one of the activities you should be doing. For videos, most businesses tend to blame the content when they fail to reach their goals with them. When your video is not performing well, it’s time to repurpose and distribute it to other platforms. The work is tedious but worth it. 

Repurposing video is not as difficult as it may appear. With planning and a structured approach, you can tell your video story in dozens of ways.

Benefits of Repurposing Video Content

  • Refresh your outdated content
  • Get more video views
  • Improve distribution
  • Better audience targeting
  • Improve SEO

The easiest way to start repurposing video is by doing two things: transcribe the video and break it into shorter clips.

Transcribe Your Videos

Have you watch some TED Talk videos? You’ll agree that the videos are highly engaging. Another thing that TED does is transcribing each video they post. The transcriptions are posted below the video in an interactive format, and some are used as foundations of blog posts.

TED goes further to upload versions of their videos on YouTube and included closed captions. Check this example video that has a transcript and a repurposed blog post.

There are various benefits of transcribing your videos. To begin, transcribing makes the videos more search-friendly. Google cannot read visual content. However, search spiders can read video meta data. Apart from this, closed captions can be indexed.

Break Videos into Shorter Clips

The engagement you will get on videos will depend on the distribution platform you use. Customizing your videos to the platforms where they will be shared, be it YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or your website, will improve engagement.

When planning your video content, find out from the videographer how much it will cost to have the length customized for different platforms. If you already have some videos you want to repurpose, here are the suggested lengths:

  • YouTube can take any length of video, from a few seconds to hours
  • The optimal video length for Facebook is 1.3 minutes
  • Instagram videos max at 60 seconds
  • The maximum for Twitter videos is 60 seconds

You may need an in-house videographer to customize your existing videos to be repurposed for the platforms you may not have used before.

With videos shared on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, shorter lengths get more engagement than longer ones. Apart from this, they can go viral. Most people at these platforms are usually in a mood to learn or be entertained in seconds. Reserve the full-length documentaries for Vimeo and YouTube.

Repurposing Shorter, Transcribed Videos

After transcribing and breaking your videos into shorter clips, you can repurpose them in a number of ways.

For example, if you have an interview, it can be repurposed to be a podcast. Clips from a corporate video can be used to showcase a tour of your company and bring out your company culture. Instructional videos can form the foundation of blog posts.

How are you repurposing your video content?