A social marketing friend was playing around one day and discovered a new way to leverage the social content he writes. There are few things more satisfying than to get MORE use out of content you’ve already created.

Anyway, he dipped into his social blogging archive, back to April about 2 years ago. He published 14 articles that month. So he opened that file, and he opened a new text file. And then he took one paragraph at random from the first blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the 2nd blog post and pasted it into the text file. He copied a random paragraph from the third blog post … well, you get the idea. He copied 8 paragraphs from 8 blog posts, then closed the blog archive to see what he had.

And you know what? This new “article” wasn’t half bad. The social content almost made sense as-is (or as-was). My friend chose a couple of new keywords to focus the article. Then he went into each paragraph, changed a word here, a sentence there, smoothed it all a bit, and in 5 minutes, he had a finished product. Sure, it sounds crazy. But try it … I’ll bet you can really leverage all your past years of social blogging.

Some other leveraging ideas:

• Look over your past blog posts for the best of the best. Take one that’s really good, get out your video cam, and film a 2-3 minute segment. Upload it to YouTube. Link to it from your site and MySpace and LinkedIn and any other social networking profiles you have.
• Keep track of every question that is emailed in to support, and every answer you give. Some of these Q & As probably suggest a “how-to” video you can do. Others may be appropriate to combine into a blog post.
• Outline an ebook you want to write. Write out the title for each chapter and section. Now write your blog posts with each of those titles as the headline. In maybe 2-4 weeks, you’ll have an ebook.
• If you have an active blog readership, do one blog where you ask questions about what resources people use to achieve certain results, or why they choose product A over product B. Then compile the results into a report to entice new readers.

To squeeze every last penny’s worth out of every single thing you do, plan ahead. Before you do it, whatever it is, think what other uses your social content could have. Blog. Article directory. Video. Podcast. Comment on someone else’s blog post. Ebook chapter. Free report for new subscribers. A somewhat different spin gives you a whole new article. The more you target multi-purpose content production, the more effective you will become.