I have a prediction.
In 2021, Facebook is going to get busted up like Ma Bell (with Instagram and WhatsApp spun off on their own). The resulting exodus of unhappy advertisers will flee into the willing arms of TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and good old SEO.
And the smart marketers will repurpose content in a few clever ways we’ll discuss here.
See, Facebook spent $10.5 billion in legal fees alone in 2019. Still a fraction of $70 billion in ad revenue they earned, from which they generated $18.4 billion in net income. They seemed invincible.
Until they weren’t.
Unable to address mounting issues with content moderation, the government treats Facebook like a publisher (The New York Times), not a technology company that allows social blogging (WordPress).
In 2021, I predict it all comes crashing down. Mister “Senator, we run ads” cannot spin Apple as evil and Facebook as the protector of small businesses. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has devoutly stated they will automate instead of hiring more humans to provide support.
Marketers will take the content they’ve made for Facebook and repurpose it to all the other channels. Turns out, short-form vertical video is a common ingredient, even on YouTube (look at the YouTube shorts format).
To test this, I had virtual assistants take most of my Facebook posts and turn them into blog posts. Behold, this has generated 7,000 new visits in the last 3 months with zero extra effort by me.
My blog now has 1,488 pages.
Tell me—when was the last time you saw a Facebook post in Google search results?
About as often as Google search results showing up in the Facebook newsfeed—or as often as the CEO of Honda drives a Toyota.
HACK #1: Post Social Media Content on Your Site (and Vice Versa)
The worlds of search and social are invisible to each other. So, Hack #1 is to copy content from one world and post it in another. There are WordPress plug-ins to do this automatically, but I like to be choosy about page titles, which are as important as the article itself.
This is not the same as trend-jacking the top Reddit stories into Facebook or syndicating news content.
Because this is your content and because it won’t trigger a duplicate content penalty on Google. Remember, anything on the web that is easily visible to Google isn’t something to copy, and that isn’t limited to blog posts and web pages—the engine is smart enough to turn most video into text (witness YouTube’s automatic captioning).
Take my friend Kaci Madden, a San Diego chiropractor, as an example. She started opening up $100 tabs across local restaurants. The local TV station posted about it on their Facebook page.
But the TV station also posted it to their website, so this is not something you want to cross-post. The news station has a Domain Rank of 81, while she has only a 32 DR—so guess who would get slapped with a SEO duplicate content penalty?
HACK #2: Cross-Post to Twitter, the Internet’s Favorite Dumping Ground.
When you post on most social networks, they let you automatically post to Twitter at the same time. Instagram is my favorite in this respect, since I can cross-post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. And I can boost all 3 of these resulting posts!
Twitter purists will frown upon this (marketers ruin everything, I know)—but look at the 14,000 tweets on my account…
How many of them do you think I actually posted natively on Twitter versus automatically cross-posting from another channel?
HACK #3: Turn Video Transcription into a Blog Post
You can transcribe via rev.com, otter.ai’s integration with Frame, Descript, or whatever tool is your favorite.
I happen to like Descript because it has a feature called Overdub, which allows you to edit/add to the audio of a video.
Facebook popularized social video (not Snapchat, YouTube, or Instagram). But because they were too proud and smirked at the government regulation, they get regulated in 2021.
Savvy marketers like us, who don’t want to get caught with all our eggs in one basket, will repurpose those assets into other channels.
You’ll see more automation and a continuation of the oversaturated marketing tools space. But the real winners are folks who produce thoughtful short-form vertical video and have VAs edit, cross-post, and boost to drive more sales.
And this work is going to be on you, the marketer. Automation isn’t at the point of being able to chop up your long-form, 30-minute video (meant for YouTube) into one minute 4:3 Facebook posts, 15 second Instagram stories, quote cards on Twitter, or blog posts on your site.
Automation cannot write your headline or ad copy quite yet. So it’s up to you to prepare for the Facebook split I see coming. And you can use these 3 hacks to get ready.
