Reuse, Repair, Repurpose Your Flopped Content

I grew up in the suburbs, where the closest thing to nature was a 5-foot-thick privacy border and a neighbor’s basset hound who bayed like a broken horn.

Now my dream is a backyard hobby farm — chickens, sheep, and a fig tree. I scroll Zillow listings for homes with prebuilt garden beds like some people browse designer bags. (If there’s a chicken coop, I immediately text my fiancé: “It’s perfect.” Never mind the house needs to be gutted.)

To soothe my semi-rural longings, I binge regenerative agriculture content—YouTube tours, Mycelium Running, Restorative Agriculture, and at least three farm podcasts this week alone.

One concept keeps coming up: Dormancy.

Nature isn’t precious about timing, but it is strategic about survival.

It’ll hold onto a seed for years if the conditions aren’t right. And when it finally sprouts, it grows like it never left.

We could learn something from that.

We’re so afraid our content will be forgotten that we never let it breathe.
We’re quick to scrap, archive, delete, but all the post really needed was a little space.

If your content can stay relevant through the algorithm’s ups and downs, you’ve won the attention economy — because you didn’t build content. You built capital.

A Facebook Marketing Expert Told Me to Tell You…

At Social Media Marketing World, I had dinner with Facebook-educator legend Mari Smith. Since then, I’ve been relistening to some of her content and found her advice that stuck:

Algorithms aren’t about recency anymore. They’re interest-based (thanks to TikTok's FYP).

A post from two years ago might resurface and go crazy. Not because it took that long to find its audience, but because one person it did reach decided the piece deserved a resurrection. The post didn’t actually flop.

In gardening, we call these “volunteers”.

Those mystery squash that pop up in compost piles, but you haven't planted squash in 2 years? Volunteer, also known as a dormant seed.

Proof: My LinkedIn “Volunteer”

This week, I was poking around in some old docs, just for nostalgia sake. I found a client deck I made in 2020. I came across a social media headline I still reference. So I posted it to LinkedIn and said, “Remember when this happened?”.

It is one of my top-performing posts the past 2 years.

It wasn’t new. It wasn’t flashy. But it still has value.

So far, I’ve already gotten

• 11 new followers
• A meeting booked next week with someone I met in the comments
• A professor asking for the slides to use in a social media class

Y’all. This stuff works.

Content repurposing might not feel as sexy as a well-established plant start from the garden center nursery. But when you grow something from seeds you saved five years ago?

Agh, there’s nothing like it.

(Does this make me a content farmer? 👩‍🌾)

Build a Content Garden, Not a Graveyard 🪦🪴

Here’s why your “past its prime” content might still be worth revisiting:

1. You have the data to experiment — so experiment.

You’ve seen what worked. You’ve seen what didn’t. That gives you context.

Try again with a different setup or post it somewhere new. Your conditions are changing all the time, you never know when or where it’ll finally succeed.

Every post you’ve published has given you something in return: Reach, comments, saves, or silence… That’s still information.

• What flopped in April might flourish in September.
• What didn’t land on Instagram might thrive in an email.
• What felt like a miss last year might hit with the audience you have now.

Your platform mix, offer, tone, and timing are all moving variables (like plant variety, temperature, shade vs sun, water needs, soil pH, etc).

Don’t just bury (or god-forbid delete) a post because it didn’t exactly how you wanted the first time. Adjust the variables, post it somewhere new.

2. You already did the labor.

We don’t like to talk about it, but every piece of content comes with a cost. If you have already put in effort, time, and a sliver of strategy, you have something of value.

Throwing that away because it didn’t go viral the first time is like pulling out a sprouted seedling just because it’s not a 10-foot sunflower yet (not to mention wasteful).

You’re already halfway to making it a better piece of content.

3. Some content doesn’t match the strategy. It works anyway.

I once worked with a company that shifted from DIYers to professional tradespeople. Our old videos were super beginner-friendly. The pros scoffed at such easy instructions.

But when those same pros started skipping steps (and breaking products) we sent them the beginner videos.

Turns out, those beginner steps saved them from costly mistakes. We never would’ve made that content for them, but they found it useful regardless of who we thought we had made it for.

That’s the power of volunteers.

We Need To Talk About Content Waste

We claim to care about sustainability.

We carry the tote bags.

We bought glass and steel straws to save the turtles.

But somehow this still happens…

Just like plastic-wrapped produce, we treat content like it needs to be shiny and new to be worth sharing.

Instead of reworking what’s already valuable, we chase newness.

We toss out usable ideas. We abandon half-written drafts.

We let a great idea that wasn’t validated by a notification slowly corrode our creativity.

Each year during Earth Day, we get a reminder to care for what we already have.

Consume less. Waste less. Do things with intention.

We need to apply this same mindset to marketing...

Here’s what sustainable content could look like:

• Refuse: Stop churning out brand new content every week.
• Reduce: Create less. Create better. Let fewer things carry more weight.
• Reuse: Reintroduce previous ideas in a new context.
• Repair: Update, reframe, and republish before you ever delete.
• Regift: Share internal notes, insights, and throwbacks to new audiences.
• Recycle: Turn your best stuff into something different: An email, a meme, a lead magnet.

Yes, we need to save the planet.

To do that, we need to start thinking long-term.

We should act with care. We should create less waste.(Bad content has an environmental impact ya know…)

Let’s start tending to our content, so we can make it slower and more nourishing.

Like a garden or a good meal. Or even, mother earth herself.

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Keep tending the ideas from previous seasons — some are just late bloomers,