refactor: short form repurposing
why a youtube-oriented linear repurposing flow is better than a tiktok-shotgun approach
This article will discuss an improvement in the process that I use for short-form content creation. This should apply to programmers and also other sorts of educators.
I encourage all programmers to position themselves as educators. Some form of thought leadership is to be expected at the senior level, but teaching others is a significant boon even to juniors because teaching reinforces learning and also provides a notable professional brand differentiation. As educators, we are also content creators.
Two particularly beneficial forms of content creation for programmers are writing and short-form video work. These are complimentary task sets that will together improve written, verbal, and nonverbal communication. I have accumulated over 21k followers on TikTok while producing over 2k short-form videos. The possibility of losing my account scared me into demanding a backup solution.
I might have lost my account due to a general TikTok ban in the United States or due to the TikTok strike policy, where some issues that I encountered are documented in the following YouTube video:
Repurpose.io filled the role as a backup solution because it can automatically repost my TikTok content into Google Drive. That was originally my main use case for trying the tool, but I quickly gained an appreciation for its primary feature set which is to repost video content from many different sources to other sources.
Not by coincidence, my short-form content and its audience originally sprung up on TikTok. That springing up is largely explainable by the unique features of TikTok, but I won’t dive into that now. Because that is where my short-form content and audience sprung up, I created workflows on repurpose.io that were TikTok-driven in nature, essentially following a shotgun pattern: Whatever gets posted to TikTok is distributed immediately to all other platforms of interest.
This turns out not to be ideal when I need to pivot away from posting on TikTok for whatever reason, which reasons I have presently encountered in the form of a strike scare. So now I would like to drive my short-form video publishing on YouTube, at least for the moment. With my shotgun workflow design in repurpose.io, this is a painful move. To prevent such pain in the next similar situation, I’m now adopting a linear repurposing workflow as follows:
When I post to TikTok, videos are reposted to YouTube only.
When I post to YouTube, videos are reposted to Instagram
Note that I post some content, particularly long-form content and live streams to YouTube that I cannot post to TikTok. As a result, I tag those videos with “long-form” or “livestream” and I have a setting in repurpose.io so that these are not propagated down the linear repurposing workflow. This also saves me money, because added Google Drive space has a cost.
Instagram posts are sent to Facebook, then LinkedIn, then Google Drive.
If the video includes “#lol” it is not sent to LinkedIn, to maintain a slightly more serious tone on that platform
Videos are sent to Google Drive whether or not they go to LinkedIn. So, this last step isn’t perfectly linear.
If I pivot away from a YouTube-oriented pattern in the future, it is true that I will need to change a step or two in the flow, but that is substantially easier than pivoting under the shotgun design.
I found that after reaching around 10k followers on TikTok, my growth on the platform from posting stalled. My growth since then has largely been due to live streaming on TikTok, while my total reach and growth on other channels have continued through repurposing. I hope this helps you too!