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Why recycling your past evergreen tweets is a GOLD MINE (and how to do it)

Did you know that retweeting your best-performing past tweets is a bulletproof way of maximizing engagement and also boosting follower growth on Twitter?

Having run Zlappo for almost a year now, I've noticed that our users can't live without putting their old evergreen tweets on auto-retweet in the background.

If you follow the pros who growth-hack their Twitter, you'll notice that retweeting their best-performing evergreen content is something they do very frequently, for at least 6 reasons:

  1. Buffer has done a study that proves that retweeting your own content boosts both reach and engagement;

  2. It's the officially-endorsed way by Twitter to reshare your old content -- Twitter actually encourages this (as opposed to reposting them as new tweets, which Twitter not only discourages but also expressly forbids);

  3. It's the most efficient way to maximize traffic/sales from your links without annoying your followers by reposting (read: spamming) your links over and over again on their timeline;

  4. It keeps your posting schedule full (if you don't have inspiration for new tweets or if life just simply gets in the way), thus keeping your audience occupied and engaged while you handle business;

  5. It brings to light your "best hits" to new followers that you gain along the way, increasing your credibility and authority in their eyes as a respectable influencer in your niche/domain; and

  6. It extends the shelf life of your tweet beyond the standard 24 hours. It's stupid to write such great tweets, or worse MEATY THREADS, only to have them visible once within a 24-hour window. Squeeze all you can out of that content, particularly if you've plugged your link in there, whether it's your SaaS landing page, affiliate product, or Gumroad sales page.

The Problem

Anyone who has tried to adopt this strategy knows that doing this manually will be a massive pain-in-the-backside -- the effort:reward ratio is just too skewed to do consistently.

Consider this:

  1. Retweeting old content is a huge time sink, and, depending on how much you tweet, it'll be a huge Sisyphean task to wade through your gargantuan body of past tweets to find the ones worthy of resharing.

  2. And then you have to remember to retweet them consistently, in addition to the 1,001 things already on your to-do list.

  3. You probably can't dig far back enough (Twitter only allows you to view your 3,000 newest tweets on your timeline), so you're limited to retweeting your recent content, unless for some fortuitous reason someone likes, retweets, or comments on some tweet you posted years ago, so you get the notification and thus can opportunistically retweet it then.

  4. How do you even decide which ones to retweet? You need to have some objective criteria based on how it has resonated in the past, not just based on gut feel or subjective liking (i.e. just because you love a tweet doesn't mean your target audience does). You can't sort your old tweets based on engagement either; the Twitter timeline is only chronological.

  5. The whole point of retweeting older content is to showcase your older content to people who might have missed it (either new followers or existing followers who just weren't on Twitter back when you posted it), so as to get them to like, retweet, and/or comment on it, so you have to retweet your old content at strategic times (when most of your target audience are online), when you might actually be asleep yourself... or at work... or spending time with family. That's a pickle.

The Solution

So how do you take advantage of this strategy without going through all that pain, agony, and misery?

1. You suck it up and commit a time to do it every day.

Make it a habit to go through your timeline and just manually click retweet or even quote-tweet a tweet that has resonated with your followers.

2. You pay someone else to do it for you.

Same as above, except it'll cost you some money and management bandwidth, obviously.

3. Outsource this to software.

This basically involves:

  • Picking out strategic daily time slots when your audience is most active (e.g. 9 a.m., 3 p.m., 6 p.m., 8 p.m., etc. -- you know your audience best)
  • Creating a bookmarked collection of your best evergreen tweets (one-time process)
  • Letting the software choose a random tweet to retweet from your bookmarks during each time slot, each and every day

The gist of it is just that, automated evergreen retweeting in the background. Makes sense?

You can of course write a script to do that, if you're a programmer, or you can just use third-party software like Zlappo for that.

(If you want to learn more on how you can do that, do read: https://zlappo.com/blog/how-automatically-recycle-your-evergreen-tweets-step-step-guide/)

Conclusion

The whole point of this post is really to open your mind to the Twitter growth hacking toolbox/arsenal that the pros use, so you can also adopt it for your own marketing and sales goals.

Whether you want to do something like this for your account, and whether you want to automate something like this, it's your choice and highly dependent on what you're trying to achieve.

What I do know is that, if you're not trying to squeeze the most out of your body of content that you work so hard to produce and promote on Twitter, you're leaving a lot of leads and indeed dollars on the table.

Hope you've found this post useful and insightful!

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