Transpositioning

The biggest opportunity in content

There’s an even bigger idea that spawns from the collaborative storytelling example above.

In fact, I think it’s the biggest opportunity in content.

I call it transpositioning.

In a general sense, "transposition" refers to the act of transferring something from one place or context to another. It's often used in music (to shift a piece from one key to another), in mathematics (to interchange rows and columns in a matrix), and in genetics (to describe the movement of a gene from one position to another within the genome).

Now apply it to content…

There is infinite white space to take content that works on one platform and reimagine it to natively suit the format demands on another.

The key is to “natively” reimagine it.

For example, the think boi’s on Twitter generate thousands of well-researched, information heavy threads every single hour.

Imo, Twitter is oversaturated with this information.

But that doesn’t mean the content isn’t gold…it just means the eyeballs viewing the content are not eager to consume it in that format.

It’s a supply and demand problem. Too much supply for not enough demand.

So the opportunity is not for that Twitter user to write yet another thread. The opportunity is to take that good information and repackage as a short-form video on Instagram Reels.

Now this sounds like an obvious insight, but from my perspective, it’s quite untapped.

Here’s why…

Most people do not have the ability (or interest) to create content across multiple mediums at a high level.

If you’re a great long-form writer, you’re almost never interested in making videos.

If you’re an amazing photographer, you’re almost never compelled to write quippy tweets.

This means that it’s fairly common for people to exist as “one-dimensional creators.”

And that means, there’s a lot of trapped gold stuck within suboptimal formats.

But I’ll make it even easier for you…to take advantage of this, you don’t even need to be able to create across multiple content mediums.

You just need to be able to organically consume content on the overserved channels to then repackage and create native content on the underserved ones.

Again, the key word is native.

Taking a written tweet, pressing the share button to IG stories, and pasting the tweet in it’s original format on IG is not native. That’s just lazy.

Native is studying what works on IG Stories and literally repackaging that text in a more optimized way.

From my perspective, Instagram and Tiktok are incredibly underserved when it comes to edutainment video content. This is content that is designed to both educate and entertain, across almost any topic.

If you’re not good at generating new content ideas yourself, just go to Twitter/Reddit/Linkedin, find interesting stuff and make videos about it on Instagram/Tiktok.

Transpositioning also applies to formats, which is why I thought of it initially.

• Zach Pogrob took Jack Butcher’s Twitter/IG B&W image style and made videos

• Morning Brew took the Wall Street journal and repurposed it in an email format

• Huberman took scientific research papers and repackaged them in consumable audio podcasts

• Barstool took reality TV and repackaged it for YouTube

• Almost every interview podcast is the repackaging of talk radio

If you zoom out far enough, you’ll realize that most of the biggest creators on earth found their signature format by transposing something from a different medium that was already working.

If you’re struggling with cutting through the noise, add the lens of transposition and see where it takes you.

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