Should you reshare old content to social media?

A common theme from blogs and content marketers on social media is to attempt to drive more visitors and engagement by sharing new posts multiple times the week its first published, and then by sharing old posts over and over.

The problem with this style is there are primarily two types of social media users. One is someone who reads their entire feed and never misses anything. By continuing to share the same thing over and over you are putting them off and they will disengage and unfollow. In my opinion, these are also going to be some of your biggest fans, because they follow fewer​ people and highly curate their feed. I am firmly in this camp and I don’t follow many brands because of this.

The other style of follower is one that rarely reads their feed and just skims what’s new. Content marketers seem to believe these are more common and that is why they push content the way they do. I know every market is different but from my experience, ​the opposite is actually true.

Thinking through the two styles and realizing I never post new articles on the weekends I decided to try a hybrid approach. Every weekend starting Friday night through Sunday night I’ve been scheduling a few old posts to be pushed out. I’ve been doing this for a month now and Saturday’s is historically the slowest day for traffic and it has almost doubled from just this change.

I feel like so much of this is just trial and error but for me, ​it’s fun digging into the archives and resurfacing a lot of old content. So far no one has started complaining and once they do I’ll revisit this idea, but you never know until you try.