If you want to be seen and heard on social media, you have to post content. Lots of content. Some experts recommend that businesses post at least once a day … and that’s just on Facebook. For maximum exposure, your brand should be posting high-quality content consistently across multiple platforms: YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and more. The content pyramid, a content marketing strategy can aid in scaling content on the desired social media platform.

Of course, posting content merely for the sake of posting content is not a winning strategy. You should only post when you have something of genuine value to say. As we’ve mentioned many times before – and always bears repeating – storytelling is absolutely essential to the creation of meaningful content. But once you have that piece of solidly crafted branded storytelling content, you might as well get the most out of it.

You can generate up to 30 pieces of quality content all based on one original piece of content. One long-form article can be the basis for infographics, quote images, animated videos, podcasts, video interviews, and more. What’s more, some of these secondary pieces of content can be even further repurposed.

A good idea is a good idea, regardless of the method of presentation or the platform on which it is presented.

Belarusian-American entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, and popular internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk is an absolute master at repurposing content. He uses a strategy he calls the “reverse pyramid” model.

Gary Vee’s reverse pyramid has six key steps:

Document > Create > Distribute > Listen/Measure > Create > Distribute

Pillar Content 

Everything starts with a piece of pillar content. This piece of informative, long-form content is at the top of the reverse pyramid and becomes the source of a plethora of additional content. The pillar content will be the basis for content marketing.

Keynote speeches, long-form interviews, and blogs are all examples of content that can serve as pillars.

Document

The first step in the ‘reverse pyramid’, content marketing strategy is to document the pillar content.

Here’s an example of a speech Gary Vee gave in Portland, which became the pillar content for 30+ pieces of original content:

Of course, the pillar content doesn’t have to be a video. This Lexicon blog became the basis for multiple pieces of content, posted across many different social media platforms.

Create

Use the pillar content as the basis for creating different types of micro content.

For example, from one Lexicon blog, we created:

An animated explainer video:

An on-camera explainer video from the writer:

And, a quote image set:

Distribute 

Distributing content on targeted social media platforms is the third step to the content marketing strategy. Pillar content should be posted on platforms that accept large amounts data such as your website, Facebook, Podcast apps, and YouTube. Micro content can then be posted on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The purpose of the micro content is to drive more traffic to the original pillar content, your social media channels, and your website.

The pillar content should be uploaded first. That way, all the related micro content can link back to the pillar.

Listen / Measure

Once your content has been distributed, elicit feedback from your audience. Gary Vaynerchuk asks his audience to comment on his YouTube videos with timestamps of their favorite sections. He uses this crowdsourcing method to see what parts of the video are generating the most interest, and then uses those parts to create even more content, like clips and quote images.

While eliciting engagement is a great idea, it isn’t the only way to listen to your audience. Most social media platforms have advanced measuring metrics that allow you to see how well your posts are performing. If a post performs well, make more like it.

Create 

At this stage, the process essentially restarts. But, this time, you know exactly what your audience wants – either through direct engagement or analytics.

As you repeat this process, your content will continuously become more refined and better tailored to your audience.

Distribute

When you create a second round of content based on crowdsourcing and analytics, it’s almost guaranteed to perform well. So, distribute it to all the relevant social media platforms and reap the rewards.

Staying relevant

The reverse pyramid method is a highly effective way to get the most out of your content. By turning one piece of original content into multiple pieces of content across multiple platforms, you essentially create a feedback loop that continuously pumps traffic back to the original piece of content.

The speech Gary Vaynerchuk gave in Portland became 30+ pieces of original content, which garnered over 35 million views across multiple social media platforms.

Once you’ve created a great piece of branded storytelling content, you might as well get the most out of it. Present it in as many different packages and from as many different angles as possible, with all roads leading back to the pillar.

Storytelling is critical to good content creation, but, unless you’re pushing that content to the right people on the right platforms, it won’t do anything for your brand.

As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “If you’re not putting out relevant content in relevant places, you don’t exist.