Your flop might just be in the wrong format
An idea that flopped in one format can work in another, so recycle the idea, not the exact post.
You spent an hour on a post, it got four likes, and you quietly decided the idea was bad. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was a good idea in the wrong outfit.
In 2023, Buffer’s social media manager wrote up how the team repurposes content. A TikTok that didn’t take off became a LinkedIn post that was one of their top posts of the month, and the same video got about 3k views on Instagram Reels against 300 on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. A tweet they posted again a year later went from a 0.90 percent to a 1.70 percent engagement rate. These are one team’s examples, not a controlled study, but they’re worth stealing.
Keep a list of ideas that got real replies or saves, even when the totals were small. Turn a thread into a short screen recording, a demo video into a three-line text post, a good reply into its own post. Change the format and the first line. Keep the idea.
The example
- Instead of
- “Deletes the onboarding thread that got 4 likes and never mentions the idea again.”
- Try
- “Turns the same thread into a 40-second screen recording: “Watch me cut onboarding from 9 steps to 3.””
Before you flush
Find your best post from last month, rewrite it in a different format (short text, screenshot, demo or thread) and schedule it for next week.