5 Ways to Repurpose Your Streams to Make Shareable Content
Live content is the bread and butter of your stream. Each day, you’ll need to broadcast a live stream on your channel for at least a few hours. But what about when you’re not streaming? Can you still boost your brand even when you’re not online?
Absolutely! Your content can be repurposed to help attract a larger audience. Let’s take an in-depth look at what repurposing is and what benefits it provides for your stream.
What is Repurposing Content?
Repurposing is when you take existing content, make some slight alterations and repost that content in a different place than where it originally appeared. Repurposing basically extends the life and use of content you’ve already created.
Repurposed content isn’t designed for your stream’s current viewers, followers and subscribers.
After all, those people are already aware of your stream. Instead, your repurposed content is created to attract new viewers. Your potential audience exists across many different platforms. Repurposed content allows you to reach people no matter where they are online.
The Benefits (and Restrictions) of Video Content
Video is one of the easiest types of content to repurpose. That’s great news for streamers. You’ll have hours and hours of daily footage available for repurposing.
You’ll post your repurposed video content across major social media platforms. But each platform has different length limits for video. Make sure your repurposed video follows these guidelines:
- Instagram videos should be no more than one minute
- Twitter videos should be 30 seconds or less
- Facebook videos should be under 1:30
- YouTube videos should be no longer than 14 minutes
Don’t worry if some of those times seem short. Interested viewers will click through to another destination such as your Twitch channel, YouTube channel or website.
Upload each video natively to the individual social platform. Doing so increases engagement and views. Natively-embedded video looks more professional and plays more reliably.
How to Repurpose Content
There are many different ways you can repurpose your existing content. You’ll want to identify both the type of content and the social media platform which appeals to your target audience. Here are some different ways you can repurpose content:
1. Highlights
Highlights of exciting, comical or well-executed gameplay are great for short clips. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are the best platforms for posting.
2. Educational
Short videos can be created to teach viewers something new about a game. Post videos with specific tactics, unique map locations and other short bits of info on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Longer walkthroughs and tutorials can be posted to YouTube. In some cases, you can create longer guides by piecing together various sections of your stream and then adding voice-over. This is a great way to cover longer sections of a game in an easily digestible way.
3. Bug Reports
Gamers love to learn about bugs, glitches or other game anomalies. If you happen to discover any unintended game functions, create a detailed video. You might also want to include a voice-over describing what’s happening, as some glitches do require a bit of explanation.
4. Matches Against Notable Players
Did you get an unexpected kill on a world champion? Did you cross paths with a famous streamer? People always like to see interactions between famous and lesser-known streamers.
In some cases, your interaction might also have been recorded by the famous streamer. You can potentially merge both videos so the entire interaction can be seen from both sides. Plus, this can be a good reason to reach out to a more famous streamer for networking purposes.
5. Add Captions to Your Videos
No matter what type of video you create, consider adding captions. There are two main benefits. First, people don’t always have the sound on when they’re browsing social media platforms, especially when they’re using a smart device.
Captions also help increase the search engine ranking of your videos. Search engines spiders are able to “read” the written captions in order to better understand what your videos are all about. This gives you an SEO advantage over videos without captions.
Final Thoughts
Streaming success involves more than the daily live broadcast. Repurposing allows you to get extra mileage out of your existing video. Plus, repurposing is relatively easy. After all, you’ve already done most of the work during your live stream.
Determine what sections of your stream are the most popular with your audience. Then develop short videos based around that type of content. Post those videos on the social media sites most often visited by your target audience.
Active social media profiles and repurposed videos are a winning combination for increasing the reach and size of your video game stream.
