Why make one piece of content when you can make 20? Many organizations go into the business of content production and spin their wheels, waste their resources, and consequently see little results from all of their work. Instead, understanding the simple principle of repurposing content can help you to get much more mileage out of every piece of content.

Content can, and should, be atomized (broken down into smaller units) or repurposed among many different platforms and media types. This ensures that it has the highest chance of reaching its maximum potential by appealing to audience members with varying needs and preferences.

For example, when creating a video for use on social media what should it aspect ratio be? Should it be a vertical rectangle a horizontal rectangle or square? Depending upon the social site you’re using the answer to that question will change. But, if you approach your content production with the objective of creating multiple pieces of content out of any one piece of content, then every single video should turn into multiple videos.

There should be a long cut, and several smaller cuts. From those videos you should be able to pull some screenshots and layer over quotes stats brother information to be used as social graphics. The transcripts from those videos can be turned into Podcasts or blogs. You can send out each piece of content via email. And if your content is comprehensive enough it can even become a slide deck.

Once you begin thinking of your content in this way, you realize that by creating one single piece of content intelligently, the output can be 20 pieces of content that can be posted all around the web organically and for use in advertising campaigns.

A social media strategy must consider your goals, timeline, budget and audience. Content atomization can help in virtually all of these areas.