Become More Memorable When You Stop Overthinking and Start Repeating

We need to talk about something that I hope will change everything for you as far as being more consistent, stopping overthinking, growing your account, and getting more sales. I think this might be one of the biggest struggles a lot of my clients still have, but you need to start repeating yourself. You can say the same thing 100 times and that's not going to drive anyone away, it's actually going to keep them around. We're looking for content that reflects exactly what we want to see, that may be what's coming up in our lives, something to make life easier, or something we love right now. Repetition in your content is not lazy, it’s strategic and the smartest creators are leveraging it to grow their accounts, boost sales, and become memorable. 

In this episode we’ll be covering:

• Why you shouldn't be scared of repeating yourself, because what consumers really want is to binge content related to their current life stage.
• Social media thrives on familiarity and repetition helps you become more recognizable and memorable.
• Marketing is all about repetition and saying the same thing over and over again in new ways.
• Your new content marketing strategy: utilizing your account insights and repurposing your top performing reels, updating and tweaking hooks and formats as needed.
• Advice for getting started as a brand new content creator if you don’t have any content to repurpose (yet!)

Recommended episodes:

• Episode 77: Simple B-Roll and Strong Hooks for Low-Effort, High-Impact Instagram Content
• Episode 96: Boost Retention Rates and Create Memorable Content that Feels Human
• Episode 97: We All Love Familiarity, Here’s How to Create that Familiar Feeling in Your Content 
• Episode 103: Hot Take: We’re Following Accounts Where We See a Reflection of Ourselves
• Episode 107: Where To Find Content Ideas So You’re Always Ready To Post
• Episode 108: Why You NEED To Take Content Creation Seriously

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Transcript

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:00]:
I am your host, Shannon McKinstrie. Welcome to Good Content, the podcast where I remove the never ending content creation, guesswork, and overwhelm so that you can actually enjoy being on social media again and growing your business with what has always worked. Good Content. All right, so we need to talk about something that I truly hope is going to change everything for you as far as being more consistent, stopping overthinking, growing your account, getting more sales. Okay. Which is you guys have got to start repeating yourself. I think this might be one of the biggest struggles that a lot of my clients still have, and I have to tell them and beg them and remind them.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:00:49]:
You can say the same thing 100 times, and then that's not going to drive anyone away. It's actually going to keep them more. Think about it this way. Like, I have friends, right? We all have friends. We all have that one story we love to tell at a dinner party, right? Or, you know, when I'm out with my husband, if we're around new group of people, it always comes up. I'm like, oh, tell them that one story, right? It never gets old to me. We all love something familiar. It's why we watch the same shows.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:01:16]:
For me, it's Seinfeld, right? For others, it's whatever we love familiarity. We love things we recognize, especially as we scroll, right? So how do you become more memorable and familiar? Repeat yourself. There are literally creators, guys who are absolutely crushing it. And they start every video the exact same way. Exact same way. There are posts of mine that have gone viral that I have shared five plus different times. You've got to stop being scared of repeating yourself. And I know it feels like we're repeating ourselves.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:01:49]:
That's because we're in our worlds. I don't even want to show y'. All. I could show you, but I'd be ashamed of how many TikToks I've probably consumed today. But that is because this is how I Scroll on TikTok. I'm looking for that quick. What do I want to see, right? I scroll a little different on Instagram. We all use our.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:05]:
These different platforms different ways, right? Right Now I'm on TikTok, just searching. I. I want to see all Coachella, all of it. I want to see every Coachella video that is in existence. So I'm swiping for that. I'm just. And I'm searching the Coachella hashtags and I'm searching Justin Bieber, right? Side note, I have been a Justin Bieber fanatic. I Won't even say fan, fanatic since, let's see, 2000.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:28]:
I was a little late. But 2011, 2011, 2012. When I watched Never say Never, the documentary, highly recommend, by the way, did come out in 2011. And it was funny because my husband and I watched it one Christmas weekend with his family back in 2011. Immediately my husband and I are like, I'm sorry. Like, we always. We knew Justin Bieber, we knew he was talented, whatever, but we watched that movie and I was like, okay, no, he's actually a musical genius. Like, it's just crazy, right? I've been obsessed with him.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:02:57]:
Then, obviously, when the Christmas album came out, I was like, I remember doing a Facebook post and people. I remember people think it was funny. I said something like, if you don't like the Justin Bieber Christmas, or if you don't have it on repeat all Christmas long, you're dead inside. Or something like that. Because I was just like this. His music is so fun. He's so. Well, back then I would say precious now.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:15]:
Sorry, Ryan. If he's listening and all the men that are listening are probably like, I know my wife, but he's beautiful. But he's also just. He's been through a lot, right? We've seen him through the struggles. We've seen him through everything. Promise. I'm getting there. I'm getting to the point of this.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:31]:
But it was every. That's all anyone's talking about right now, at least. Obviously there's other things talk, right? I don't want to speak in absolutes, but that's all TikTok right now, especially. And Instagram as well, when I was just scrolling reels earlier. And it's like every. All these Justin Bieber songs are trending again. That's because that's what everyone's talking about.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:03:48]:
Things start trending based on what's happening and what's being talked about. So I'm basically scrolling TikTok for my dopamine fix of Coachella. My husband, I went to Coachella two years ago. It was completely, I want to even say life changing experience. It was just one of those things. It was like, wow, that was insane. I can't believe we did that. First of all, we're in our 40s, so we're like, what are we doing here? But it was so much fun.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:11]:
We. Something about music festivals, right, where you just get to like tap into even different parts of like, of your life and your world and the different eras of you and just meeting so many people. It's an experience, right? So I've just been really into that. So again, when I say how much content I consume in a day, it doesn't mean I'm actually bringing in a lot. I'm stopping on what is relevant to me right now and what I want to see. We're all doing it depending on what stage of life we're in. Something coming up that we've got going on, if we're starting a new career, any content advice about starting a new business and whatever, starting a new job, we're going to stop on that stuff. If we're about to have a baby, if we're getting married, right? We stop on that life stuff.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:04:53]:
But what I want to say is like, if I'm planning a wedding, if I'm starting a business, I'm shifting careers, I'm moving somewhere, I'm going to be binging content and I will not get sick of said content. Think about it. Think about the last time you had a big life event, right? Maybe you got a dog, maybe you moved to a new city. Whatever it is, right? You don't get sick of that content. You are eating it up right now because you want to see all of it. That's what I mean. When I will watch 20 reels or 20 TikToks or 20 YouTube shorts on wedding floral ideas, I will watch if someone's learning how to golf, if someone's kid just got diagnosed with something, you're going to consume everything that you can possibly find, right? If you just got really passionate about politics or wherever you are in your faith, you're going to want to consume that content. That's why the algorithm shows you so much of what you are signaling that you want to see.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:05:43]:
So the algorithm knows we want to see similar topics pretty frequently based on our lifestyle, our age, our location, season of life. So why are you so scared to say something again? We want it. Even if we saw your content a week ago about the same subject, we want to see it again. You guys know. And actually I just poured a glass of wine. Cause it's Sunday night and I was like, I'm gonna go do my podcast right now. Because I was like, let me just do it. I'm fired up about this subject.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:09]:
So I was like, I'm a glass of wine and go record. I will never get sick of videos that tell me the same five white wines from Trader Joe's. I need to find, I need to see. I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot. They. I need to get that again. I Am begging you to start repeating yourself. So I have a client who's gone viral so many times and I have to beg her to reshare it again.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:06:33]:
She's just like. I'm like, I promise, everyone has forgotten that reel that went viral three months ago or six months ago, and if they haven't forgotten it, they want to see it again. It's okay. This is also a shout out to all the social media marketers out there who are juggling, because I talked to someone in the DMs the other day and she asked me. She was like, I would really love some help. I'm like, how do I manage all these brands and all this content? And I'm like, oh, I know. I was manag 20 plus Facebook pages at one point in my career. This is before Instagram was like, you know, really blowing up.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:07:06]:
This is back in, like, 2013, when really it was like, everyone was just really worried about Facebook. And LinkedIn at the time, even back then, it was like a no, no to repeat yourself. Because we were consuming less, we were on less apps, we were following less people. So it was kind of like, ooh, you don't want to repeat yourself too often. Marketing is essentially a lot of it is saying the same thing over and over again in fresh, different ways. So I'd be like, ooh, let's, let's, like, remix it. Let's do this, let's make it different. Now I'm like, I mean, even a year ago, I think I would tell you, oh, that reel that went viral.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:07:36]:
Let's just maybe let's turn it into this, or let's do something different with it. Now I'm like, reshare that bad boy, do it again. And if he doesn't do as well as last time, we figure out why. What's changed in the content world? How can we make the hook stronger? But I say the same things over and over and over again. I shared a reel last week. This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've shared it. Every single time it's gone viral. This time it's not going as viral.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:07:59]:
So I'm realizing, I'm like, okay, that I did record it for the first time a year ago. So maybe I need to just kind of freshen up the hook and I'll rerecord it. There's lots of ways that you can do this, right? Like I said to the social media expert I was talking to in the DMs, a lot of times, social media managers, social media Content creators. You know, if you're managing and creating content for other brands and putting it out, you get exhausted because your clients think you need fresh content every single month, when in reality you can take that same carousel you did and flip it into a reel or share it completely again if you want to. The rules, all those rule. Especially if you heard a quote unquote rule a year ago, I would absolutely forget it because so much has changed. Again, everyone's trying to create content. Everyone's trying to get in the content creation game.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:08:45]:
Everyone's trying to get their bag right. Everyone's jumping into ugc, everyone, right? So it's a different game. So you need to repeat yourself even more than you think you do. So I wanted to talk about this in this episode, really just to say take a piece of content, even if it didn't do that well for you a few months ago, let's say it didn't do that well. How can you now look at it, throw it in the Claude, throw it in the chat, whatever, and say, maybe study a couple creators. They don't have to be in your field. They can be just really create creators that you love and you look up to study their hook, their structure, whether it's, you know, carousel, talk to camera, B roll with text and just be like, how can I take their hook and use it for that tip? I shared that story, I shared that joke I shared six months ago. That did okay, but I wanted to do better.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:09:35]:
How can I put that in that formula that they created that did so well? Repeat yourself in a way that is going to connect more in 2026 based off what you see, working with the top creators. And there's your content for the week. You could literally for this week, go back three months, six months, go to your Instagram Insights. If you want to repurpose content that actually did really well, look at like what content brought in the most followers over the past three months, six months, take five or seven of those posts. And I rarely do what I did last week, which was what I said, take a reel, a full reel that I shared and just share it again. Rarely do I do that. I do that maybe once a month, once every two months. Usually I take the piece of content that did well and repurpose it, quote, unquote, meaning I'll make a reel.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:20]:
I'll turn it into a carousel, or I'll make it a static thread image of a quote and then in the caption, whatever. Or if it was B roll with text, I'll do A talk to camera, something like that. And I know a lot of people have questions about that. And the best way for me to explain it, if I'm doing a talk to camera reel, that's 30 seconds, that script that I said will be a carousel. And I'll put the first line as the first slide, next slide, the next line I say. That's what I mean. Like you just take it and you just flip it into a different format. So that's your homework this week is go back and if you're brand new to content creation, totally fine.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:10:52]:
I want you to write down conversations you've had, questions that have come up, things that have happened this week, and this is your sign to start testing. And then in three months, in two months, and in one month, you then take what worked and just say it again in a different way or flat out reshare it. I can't tell you how many times I especially in trials, a real that did well a week ago or two weeks ago, I'll throw it into trials. So I'll leave you with this. Repetition is not lazy, it's strategic. And saying the same thing over and over and over again, sharing the same recipe you shared a couple months ago, they're not gonna be mad. Actually, that's a perfect way to end it. Cause I think maybe this will help you guys.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:11:32]:
Cause I feel like we all consume food content, right? Or travel. Think of something you watch a lot of you consume. Do you think the top travel, food etc creators have only shared a tip, a recipe, whatever, on their Instagram one time and never shared it again? No, that would be crazy. We cannot. We are not machines, we are human beings. And I just want to ask you, like, how much have you consumed content this week that you've probably heard over and over again? How many Justin Bieber tiktoks and reels has Shannon McKinstry watched? Pretty much all of them. I know you're thinking, but Shannon, we're all not Justin Bieber. I, I know, wouldn't that be great? We have no problem with engagement.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:15]:
But what I mean is if you're managing a ton of accounts or you're managing a full time job and content creation is like always on the back burner. Repeat yourself. And if you're a social media manager and you're like, my clients don't want me to repeat, send them this episode. The smartest creators in the game are repeating themselves. And I'll end it with this because this is another good point I want to say, or they're repeating the same exact formulas with their content. Think of the Alex Earls, whatever it was a get ready with me, get ready with me, get ready with me, get ready with me. Those started taking off and then they switched it up and added a little bit more in. You become familiar by repeating yourself.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:12:50]:
You become familiar and recognizable and memorable when you repeat yourself. So do not make this harder than it needs to be and lean into repeating yourself and anything that did well for you. Three, six months ago. Maybe even take a whole week of content that you shared six months ago and that's your content. Try it again. And of course, like I said, mix it up a little bit. Maybe look at a hook that's performing really, really well. One of my hooks be like, okay, I shared a tip about this stretch or I shared a funny reel about.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:21]:
I did one this weekend on TikTok about like, oh, your husband goes golfing for six hours on a Saturday. Well, I disappear too. Like showing like I go to the mall and whatever my daughters. Do you know how many ways I could say that exact same thing? So many ways. Dozens of ways. You can lean on, Claude on, chat on all these things, say the same things. Do you know how many times I've made a joke about my love of Taco Bell? Do you know how many times I have shared? And even every Monday, I typically share a reel where I say, I heard you were looking for what to post this week here. I created it for you.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:13:51]:
Those went viral a couple times. For me, they're not doing well anymore. So what am I going to do? Am I going to stop repeating myself? No, I'm gonna find a new way and I'll be sharing it tomorrow. Which by, by the time you're listening to this, I mean, yesterday. Cause episodes come out on Tuesdays, but I'm gonna find a new way to say it. It's going to be the same tips, but a different hook. When something stops working, it's typically not the actual tip, joke story message. It's the delivery.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:18]:
Because we're scrolling. Think of Shannon looking for that dopamine hit of Justin Bieber. That's how fast we're scrolling these days. We're looking for exactly what we want to see. What's coming up in our lives, what's going to make life easier. Something that we love right now that we find funny. Think about those things. Think about your person's headspace as they scroll.

Shannon McKinstrie [00:14:35]:
And you'll create content so it. And it'll. You'll find yourself being way less overthinking. Mode and way more efficient mode. I love you, friend. You've got this. Talk to you next week. Or if you need me in the meantime, I'm over on the gram.