Giving new life to old content

Giving new life to old content

Oct 25, 2021

Have you ever found yourself writing the same email you wrote last year to participants, vendors, or sponsors, but for the upcoming race you have? Or, how about the same social media post you wrote last year to welcome your participants, but it contained newly added dates and links to registration? There are so many scenarios where this situation holds true. I mean, we are creatures of habit, so it kind of makes sense.

I'm probably not the only one who has, but if you have never faced this problem, then congratulations, you probably have a pretty good system in place!

Now, I know there are online Saas (Software-as-a-service) products out there that let you join for a monthly fee to help with social media posts, etc, but those tools don't really, as far as what I have found, provide a way to simply replace last year's event data with this year's event data. The general workflow, as I have found, involves creating your social post the first time, then when you need it again, you duplicate it, replace the information you need, then re-schedule your post with it. It's a few steps too many if you ask me, but I'm picky that way.

I kind of wish there was a way to have templated social posts, emails, etc. that we could just replace the old data with the new data and all the new templates would be merge in the newly added event data in one fell swoop. Now, if you're saying to yourself "Woah, woah, woah, wait....Brian, but there IS a system out there for this!", then PLEASE let me know!!! This is something I've been wanting for years!!!

Assuming there is no such product out there, I've been wrestling around with my own solution using Google sheets in the past, which let me add, is doable, but there is a lot of work to it using all sorts of formulas. What you see below is something that I produced that allowed me to create bulk content to be uploaded into Hootsuite that allowed for scheduled posts, which worked based off of a workback schedule (X days/time before a target date)

However, more recently, with some custom code, i've been able to take data and create new content a little more easily. There is so much more that goes into this, but here is a simple screenshot of what I have done so far with this. This is an idea I'm toying around with to be more useful as a Saas product for others to use, as well.

What struggles have you had related to content you create and what have you done to overcome them? Have you bought into a software product, have you changed how you go about your process? Would something like this be helpful in your workflow?

~ Happy Trails, BG


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