How do we feel about blog or Twitter reruns? Repeating content: Smart or annoying?

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about, well, reruns. Especially this time of year when traffic to this blog usually plummets no matter how often I blog which makes sense… we’re all selling and don’t really have time to read. So wouldn’t it make sense for me to pull from my large pool of timeless posts and put the blog into reruns rather than waste time writing new posts no one will read?

I’ve done a version of this. When I don’t have a post ready I often tweet an older post but this “already run” is usually six months older or more. My feeling is, a post that old may be new to you if you just recently started reading or you may have already forgotten it if you read it a while ago and find new value in it. (We talked about this a bit here.) And this rerun only goes out to Twitter followers, not RSS subscribers.

But some people are even more aggressive with their reruns. How about those people that tweet the link to their new blog post over and over several times during the day? Some will add a caveat like, “Just repeating this for the lunch crowd” or “If you missed it, here’s my new blog post” but I have to be honest, that annoys the crud out of me. I’m already following you which means I saw the link the first time. Repeating it verbatim only annoys me and makes me more likely to unfollow. But clearly not everyone thinks this way since so many people do this. Sometimes I write what I think is a great blog post that gets ignored and I wonder if I should be doing this, tweeting it over and over again throughout the day. But if it annoys me it just seems wrong to do it to my followers.

I’ve also seen some blogs do this. One of my favorite guilty pleasures, Regretsy, does reruns frequently where she just repeats blog posts from One Year Ago Today in their entirety. And I know she gets hate mail about this because she posts it and, as much as I like the site, I have to agree this is stupid. There’s already an archive, why repost the same content more than once? The original version is still there on the site for anyone to read. But when you’ve got multiple years worth of back content, much of it timeless, how else can you direct readers to that still relevant but maybe not as new content?

What’s your take?