How to turn one video into a month’s worth of content

How to turn one video into a month’s worth of content

Content can be very time consuming and tedious to develop, especially when you don’t have a team of people working together to create it. Do you get tired of always brainstorming and developing content? We have a strategy that helps you turn one piece of thoughtful content into an entire month’s worth of content. This strategy is called chunking, a content strategy that allows you to make the most of your social content calendar. The strategy has been around for a long time, but Gary Vee was the guy who made it popular (see his take on chunking content here). The idea is you plan one large piece of content and then you break it down to small bite-sized pieces of content that can be distributed across all of your channels. You’ll save a ton of time and will never run out of ideas again. Plus you’ll give your audience a better, more immersive experience through smaller pieces of content they love to consume every day.

The approach to chunking content looks a lot like an upside-down pyramid.

Top of the pyramid is where you have your major piece of content, could be a video you made about a trip you took, a Q&A, or IGTV whatever you want the highlight of all the following posts to be about. 

Middle of the pyramid is where you have a smaller cut of the longer video or interview. This could be a short highlight video, a story post, or just another reminder to check it out. The middle of this pyramid could be the most important because this where you are making a commercial for yourself to get your followers interested in what you have coming that week 

Bottom of the pyramid is the final step in this breakdown and that is where you distribute! All platforms you mainly use and maybe not so much use, each view and person is valuable and could lead to more. 

chunking content can save you a ton of time

Let’s assume you are a travel influencer and you captured a bunch of raw great video content on your recent trip to Peru. You pieced together all of your favorite parts of your trip into a 20 min video covering all the amazing things you should do while traveling to and around Peru. This same 20 min video and supporting raw pieces of content are going to be the basis for which you’ll pull the rest of your smaller pieces of content. During your trip, you enjoyed a ton of amazing food and drinks (and captured this content on your phone of course) – which you later cut into 5 shorter videos and 10 photos. The beautiful landscape gives you another 10 incredible stills and 5 additional videos. The fun, unique experiences you captured while stumbling around the cities and towns round out the content. All in all your one trip and one edited longer-form video allowed you to produce more than 30 posts (photo, video, gif, reels, you name it)! Now is the easiest part – you edit these posts for the social platforms you use the most and post away.

Let’s talk about another example. Perhaps you love to restore furniture. You could take one old wood desk project, record yourself restoring the desk from beginning to end – that becomes your long-form video. You then cut aspects of the video to create shorter specific videos for each of the stages of your project: discovery (1), preparation (2), re-building (3) sanding (4), staining (5), finishing (6), and re-selling (7). You capture a ton of stills for each of the steps as well which can be turned into individual posts. Pretty soon you see how one simple project can turn into an entire month’s worth of content!

When you start to consider all you need to do is plan 10 big ideas per year instead of 40 to get all the content you need for a full year, content brainstorms, and maintaining a consistent posting schedule feels a lot more achievable.