📹️ How (And Why) To Recycle Your Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that remains relevant regardless of season or time frame. It will generate interest and stay “fresh” for your readers over a long period of time.

That's why Evergreen content is one of the most useful and effective parts of a content marketing strategy since you can re-post it again and again and continue to generate interest

So   getting all the engagement you can out of your Evergreen content is one of our main goals here at SmarterQueue, and we've made it easy with the   Evergreen Recycling feature  💪

In This Article


Video Walkthrough


What Is Evergreen Content?

Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date, meaning it will continue to bring value to your audience time and time again. 

Almost anything that isn't tied to current events or promotes limited-time offers has the potential of becoming Evergreen content. Even some date-specific posts can be evergreen, as holiday posts can sometimes be just as relevant next year. 

Some amazing topics for great evergreen content could be:

  • Inspiration posts or quotes, as these will always be relevant and will provide the same value each time;
  • Tips & tricks on topics related to your services or interests;
  • Promotion for blog posts that you've worked on and should continue to drive traffic;
  • Customer testimonials or information about your services and/or what you have to offer your followers;
  • Lists or How-To tutorials, as they'll always attract interest from both existing and new audiences. 

Like pine trees retain their leaves throughout the year, these types of posts will continue to get shared, attract new followers, generate leads or website traffic, and keep your publishing going even when you don't have the time or inspiration to come up with new posts. 


What Is Evergreen Recycling?

Since Evergreen content has so much potential, we want to make sure you have the means to easily post it again days, weeks, or even months later and still reap the benefits 💪    

With our   Evergreen Recycling feature, you can automate reusing your Evergreen content and ensure it gets a boost in engagement while allowing yourself time to come up with new posts.

And all you'd need to do is set your posts to Recycle After Posting. You can do this as you're creating new posts or editing existing ones in the Post Editor:

You'll also have full control over how many times your posts are recycled, as you can have them expire after a certain number of cycles and/or a specific date.


How Does Evergreen Recycling Work?

Evergreen posts will be sent to the Queue just like any other. 

Once an Evergreen post gets published, it gets added back to the bottom of the Queue - so once you go through the remaining posts in the Queue for that Category and Social Profile combination, the Evergreen post will reach the top of the Queue again and get re-posted.

All queued Evergreen content will be published based on the Timeslots you set up when you created your Posting Plan

As an example, you create a Category called Spring Inspiration and set up a Timeslot for 1:00 PM on Mondays to post from it.

If you then add four articles to  Inspiration, SmarterQueue will publish Post #1 first. 

After Post #1 is published, it will be placed at the bottom of your Queue, to be posted again once the other three posts have been published.


So if all of the posts in your Queue are marked as Evergreen posts, you’ll continually have posts added to the bottom of your Queue after they’re published, so you’ll never run out of posts.

Note: For more information on how your Evergreen content will be scheduled, check out How Does SmarterQueue Publish Your Content?

And you can always add new content (either Evergreen or not) to the top or bottom of the Queue. This way, you get to:

  • prioritize new posts should you want to, by adding them to the top of the Queue;
  • refresh your Queue by having new content added here and there over time;
  • maximize engagement for Evergreen content, as it will get to be published more than once and find a new audience;
  • maintain a continuous social media presence without worrying that you'll run out of posts. 

💡 Tip: Use Variations to keep your Evergreen content fresh for longer! You can create text and/or media Variations so that each time your Evergreen post is published, your audience will see different text/media. Check out What Are Variations? How To Vary Images & Text For Evergreen Posts for information on how to take your Evergreen posts to the next level.

Tip: Want help creating great text captions? Use our AI Caption Writer to generate captions from scratch or re-write your existing copy 💪


How Does Evergreen Recycling Work With Your Post Timing Settings?

When creating your content in the Post Editor, SmarterQueue gives you several Post Timing options

As long as you've selected 'Recycle After Posting' to have your content recycled, the posts will be published as follows:

  • Post Now: the post will be sent out right away, after which it will be added to the bottom of the Queue to be recycled based on your Posting Plan.
  • Add to Queue: depending on your selection, the post will be added directly to the top or bottom of the Queue to be posted based on your Posting Plan - once it's posted once, it will continue to be added to the bottom of the Queue to be recycled.
  • Schedule: your post will first be published on your specified dates/times and only after those have been fulfilled the post will be added to the bottom of the Queue to be recycled based on your Posting Plan.
  • Recurring: posts set as recurring will be published in perpetuity, so Evergreen Recycling doesn't apply to them - that said you are still able to set recurring posts to expire. 

How Can I Edit An Evergreen Post For Future Cycles?

After the Evergreen Content is published, we move the post back to the bottom of its Sub-Queue (specific Category and Social Profile combination), ready to be published in the next cycle.

You can edit the post at any time, and the new content is what will be used for all future cycles of that Evergreen post.

1. Navigate to the post you’d like to edit inside of the Queue, and click the ‘Pencil’ icon to edit the post.

2. This will open the  Post Editor, where you can edit any of the parameters of your post, including Category, post text, media, Post Timing, and Evergreen Post Recycling settings.

3. When you’re done simply  click 'Save' and the post will be updated and any changes reflected in your Queue. 

  • If you only changed the post content, its position in your Queue will be unchanged
  • If you edited Post Timing settings or the Category, its Queue position will be updated accordingly.

💡 Note: Edits made to Evergreen posts will affect all subsequent cycles of the post


How Can I Measure Evergreen Performance Over Time?

You can easily check how each of your published posts is doing by checking your Past Posts

Here, you can look up a variety of useful metrics, including performance details for each time an Evergreen post has cycled through your Queue.

To see this, click on the ellipsis menu ('...'), then choose 'View Stats Per Cycle':

You will be able to check the information for each cycle, as well as check the total values below, for the same multitude of engagement metrics. 

If you want more information on how much more engagement you received by recycling your Evergreen posts, you can look at the overall data for all your past posts by accessing the menu panel on the right-hand side of the SmarterQueue Dashboard: 

Looking at the example above, we can see that Evergreen Recycling makes a real difference when it comes to your engagement numbers. In this specific case, by adding multiple additional cycles to sent content, we achieved 98.6 times more likes, 63.2 times more shares, 808.1 times more clicks and so much more. 


Evergreen Recycling Limits

There are some limits in place, to prevent social media platforms from flagging your accounts for spamming duplicate content:

  • We don’t allow the same Post Text to be published twice within 24 hours. This is true whether you try to post manually, or have scheduled posts.
  • Your Evergreen Queue can’t repeat more than twice per week. 
    • In other words, you must have at least half as many Evergreen posts, as you have Timeslots.
    • For example: if you have 10 Timeslots per week for your Facebook Page in the Inspiration category, you need to have 5 or more Evergreen posts in that Queue.
  • If you don’t have many Evergreen posts in a Queue, you have to spread out your Timeslots, so that the same post isn’t published twice in one day.
    • For example: if you have 10 Timeslots per week, and 5 Evergreen posts, you can’t have more than 5 Timeslots on the same day. This would result in the same post being published twice on that day.

Note: Check out our fantastic blog for details on How To Boost Engagement Reach With Evergreen Recycling!