At Ship 30 for 30, we’re big fans of Twitter.
Of all the online writing platforms out there today, Twitter is (without question) the best at:
- Distributing relevant content to the right readers
- Accelerating great content to a point of virality
- Leveraging mutual audiences to create shared opportunities for audience growth
3, 4, 5 years ago, this was not true for Twitter.
In fact, between 2014 and 2017, Quora was the single best social writing platform on the Internet (and very few people took advantage of it). During those years, it was very common for new writers to be able to rack up millions (or even tens of millions) of views on their work in a relatively short period of time. That’s because Quora was in the “sweet spot” of its growth trajectory—right before they turned on monetization (ads) and started throttling users’ reach in the name of “sponsored posts.” This is something that happens to nearly every social platform at some point or another. But for a brief period of time (2-5 years), there is a window where you can capitalize and accumulate significant readership compared to other platforms.
Medium’s heyday, for example, came right after Quora’s. Between 2016 and 2019, Medium was probably the best platform on the Internet for distributing longform content. Their distributing flywheel was humming nicely, and new writers could experience success in a relatively short period of time.
Those days are long gone.
These up-and-down cycles happen everywhere online.
And in the digital writing world, they’ve been happening for 20 years (since the dawn of blogging). One platform dominates for a while, then either they fall apart or someone else comes along with a different value proposition, and all the digital writers have to hop back in their boats and sail for a new island.
Well, right now, Twitter is the best social writing platform on the Internet.
But LinkedIn is an island with a lot of promise—and today, we’re going to walk you through how you can repurpose your best Twitter content on LinkedIn to double your reach, exposure, and audience.
Let’s give in!
Step 1: Audit Your Twitter Library
If you have been writing inside Typeshare.co then you have been accumulating a treasure trove of data.
Go inside your Analytics dashboard, scroll down, and sort by Views.
When it comes to repurposing content, this is arguably the greatest “growth hack” on the Internet.
(And the best part is... it’s not even a growth hack! It’s just your best content.)
Sorting by Views is a good way of getting a high-level perspective on what’s resonating the most at-scale. The reason you want to repurpose content based on Views and not Comments/engagement is because engagement on every platform differs. For example, on some platforms, people comment a LOT. And other platforms, people comment very little. Engagement tends to be more platform-specific—whereas Views is a more typical and overarching metric. If something has a lot of Views on one platform, there’s a decent chance it’ll accumulate lots of views on a second platform.
Also, Typeshare is a great overarching dashboard you can look at, but you can also use the Analytics functions inside social platforms themselves. Twitter has an Analytics dashboard, as does Quora, Medium, etc. But Typeshare is the easiest to see all your content in one place, and gives you the ability to sort by different metrics accordingly.
Step 2: Start At The Top, And Work Your Way Down
Are you ready for the big “growth hacking” secret here?
The single best way to begin repurposing your content on a 2nd platform (say Twitter → LinkedIn) is by going into your Analytics, sorting by Most Viewed, and working your way down.
Take your most-viewed Thread, Atomic Essay, or article and, quite literally, copy/paste it over to LinkedIn.
When you go into your Analytics dashboard and sort by Most Viewed, you will see content you wrote very recently and content you might have written a long time ago. That’s fine. The beauty of building a library of content is that timeless content doesn’t lose its value. Whether you wrote it yesterday or a year ago is irrelevant. And when you bring it to a new platform, nobody has any idea how long ago you wrote it—which means you can repurpose it to the next-new platform over and over again!
Step 3: Format Your Twitter Threads For LinkedIn
If you are repurposing Twitter Threads on LinkedIn, there are 2 techniques you should consider using.
Line Breaks
The first is copy/pasting each Tweet from your Thread over into your LinkedIn post (sort of like you’re assembling a longer form article), but using line breaks to separate each “Tweet.” On Twitter, each Tweet sort of comes with line breaks inherently because, well, each Tweet in your Thread feels like a “break.” To create this same sort of easy reading experience on LinkedIn, simply use a dash between each “Tweet” to tell the reader you are moving from point to point.
All Caps
If you don’t want to use line breaks, the other way you can make the reading experience easy for readers is by putting your mini-headlines throughout in all caps.
Again, this helps readers easily “skim” your long-form LinkedIn post (which is your entire Twitter thread) and find the section(s) they find most valuable.
Step 4: Alternate Repurposing Threads & Individual Tweets
You can repurpose Threads from Twitter, but you can also repurpose individual Tweets.
After all, it’s your content! You can do whatever you want with it!
Oftentimes, what you’ll learn is that certain content that didn’t perform as well on Twitter actually performs better on LinkedIn, and vice versa. That’s one of the benefits of creating a library of content and republishing it elsewhere: it gives the things you write a “second life,” and allows them another chance to grab people’s attention.
Step 5: Share Pictures Of Stand-Alone Tweets
You can also (to change things up) share images of Tweets (now we’re getting meta with it) on LinkedIn instead of copy/pasting the actual words themselves.
The reason this is a worthwhile tactic to experiment with is because sometimes algorithms give more (or less) priority to “image” content opposed to “text” content.
There’s no guarantee that sharing an image means your content is automatically going to perform “better,” however it is fun to experiment with these different forms of native content to see how things perform—and hypothesize on your own about why.
When sharing an image of a stand-alone tweet, it’s great to pair it with some sort of copy above the text.
Republishing Cadence
The big question everyone asks when republishing content across multiple platforms is:
“How often can I republish?”
There is no right answer, but a good cadence to aim for is once per day.
Maybe twice—once in the morning, once in the early evening.
But republishing content 5x or 10x per day floods the system, and republishing content 1x per month is too infrequent. If you want to grow, aim for once a day, and just focus on long-term consistency.
Doing this (from Twitter → LinkedIn) is a simple, easy way to 2x your reach, exposure, and audience.
Give it a shot—and let us know what you learn in the process!
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