Most social content has a lifespan of about a day. You write something good, it reaches a fraction of your audience, and then it is gone.
An evergreen library is the answer: a small, deliberately kept set of posts that stay true, which you bring back on a rotation. This page is about building and maintaining that library. How to decide what counts as worth reusing is covered in content recycling, and how to set the repeats up safely is in how to automatically repost.
What “evergreen” means
Not “old” and not “performed well”. It means still true and still useful to someone reading it for the first time today. A post can be your best ever and completely unsuitable because it was about something happening that week.
Build the library as a list
Keep it somewhere you can sort, such as a spreadsheet. One row per post, with these columns:
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Idea | One line saying what the post is |
| Theme | Explainer, opinion, invitation, how-to or fact |
| Version | Which rewrite this is, and the date you wrote it |
| Last reviewed | The date you last read it and judged it still true |
| Retire by | A date, or a condition such as “when pricing changes” |
The last two columns are what keep a library alive. Without them it is a pile.
Start small and mix it
Ten to twenty good posts is a working rotation. A hundred mediocre ones is a feed nobody reads.
Choose by usefulness, not by performance. An old post that earned engagement because of its timing will not earn it again.
Mix themes. A library of twelve posts might hold three explainers, three how-tos, two opinions, two standing invitations, one post that says what you do and one operational fact such as hours or where to find you. If all of them are the same kind of post, it reads as a loop even when each is fine.
Write every entry fresh when you add it. The version from a year ago was written for a moment. Writing it again for a general reader usually produces something better, and nobody sees a duplicate.
Spread the rotation
For most accounts, each item monthly or every two weeks is enough, and daily is almost always too often for the same content. Space the items so that two library posts do not land back to back, and leave days for new work. Once evergreen content is the majority of the feed, people can tell.
The maintenance nobody does
A rotation is set up once, works, and then runs unattended for a year. In that year the product changes, the team changes and opinions change, while the rotation keeps publishing the old version.
- Review every quarter. Read the whole library and ask of each row whether you would post it today. Rewrite it, update “Last reviewed”, or retire it.
- Keep numbers out. Prices, limits, headcount and feature counts do not belong in a rotating post. If it needs a figure, it is not evergreen.
- Know how to pause. On the day something bad happens, a cheerful automated post is what you will remember. Any repeating schedule can be paused, and resumed later, from your repeat posts list.
What does not belong
Announcements, anything with a date, anything about the news, anything with a figure, replies, and anything you have changed your mind about.
Setting it up
A rotation runs on recurring schedules. The page for that feature is recurring social media posts, and the blog guide to choosing between a repeating rule and a refilled queue is recurring posts: when to use them.
