Social media has become an essential instrument for promoting online and offline businesses, implementing PR strategies, providing customer support, running marketing campaigns, presenting your fresh blog post, and much more. Having an effective social media strategy is vital if you want to make your business or event successful and engage with your potential customers. Using social media can be hard because of the big number of platforms, tools, and techniques that are available. Understanding how to manage your content across different channels and using cross-posting effectively is not always clear and easy, which may eventually drive to a loss of brand reputation and client loyalty.
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To give you more tactics for using social media, this post will take a closer look at the advantages and downsides of “cross-posting” the same content across different social media channels.
What is Cross-Posting?
Cross-posting means posting the same posts, messages, announcements, or other content across several platforms. Companies may use cross-posting to promote their brand, attract new clients, raise awareness about an active sale or promotion and save time on promotion. Companies can cross-post across the same channels, by posting the same content and information to the same social media profile, or they can cross-post across different channels, like social media platforms and professional networking websites.
Cross-Posting vs Multi-Posting
Cross-posting varies from multi-posting since multi-posting covers posting identical messages across several channels. Brands who participate in multi-posting typically duplicate the same post and publish it across several online forums, while brands who use cross-posting don’t just copy the same post. Instead, they transfer the same information, but with another appropriate approach.
The Drawbacks of Cross-Posting
Is cross-posting bad?
Cross-posting does not have the greatest reputation among social media marketing companies or some of their customers.
Even though creating content for social media is hard enough, and it’s easier to publish the same content across multiple social networks. But the posts your friends ‘like’ on one platform aren’t the exact same posts your followers or friends will share on another. The tone of voice, language, visuals, and overall customization best performing posts for Instagram aren’t the same for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
If you post on Instagram and put 20 hashtags there, that’s not going to fit on your Facebook Page or your TikTok videos, or on LinkedIn. The posts aren’t adjusted according to each platform’s best practices. So, it may fail across multiple social channels, especially since users want different content on each social network (even if they are your followers across each platform that you’re on).
Cross-posting, however, can be extremely successful when executed properly. Let’s take a look at a few crucial advantages associated with the best practices in cross-posting.
When crafting a social post, it’s important to consider the following:
- The audience on the channel you’re posting and appealing to
You’ll want your tone of voice and message to be more professional when crafting a LinkedIn post, whereas you’re encouraged to apply a more casual approach on Instagram.
- The formatting differences per channel
When it comes to Twitter, the message is restricted to 280 characters per Tweet. Whereas on Instagram, you have an opportunity to speak out with 2,200 characters per post. Should you craft posts with a one-size-fits-all-channels approach, you are at the risk of your Tweet cutting off in the middle of your sentence due to character restrictions, or a bad handle being involved within your Tweet due to someone’s manage adjusting across platforms.
- The instructions per platform to monitor and prevent spammy activity
Last year, Twitter announced new guidelines enclosing the use of automation and posting the same (or substantially similar) poss over multiple profiles you manage.
What Are the Benefits of Posting the Same Content?
Such a strategy for running brand accounts has its benefits:
- It saves you the effort of creating and adjusting your posts for a particular social network. You create one post that is really cool and publish it everywhere. Quite often, it is better than making 3-5 unique but mediocre publications.
- You reach bigger audiences by reminding your followers from all your channels about yourself. Abandoned corporate profiles make a bad impression.
- You improve engagement and attract new followers.
Publishing on all social media platforms at once: In which cases you may need that?
Posting content on all social media accounts at once is a good idea for those who have corporate profiles but don’t have a big team for creating unique posts for all networks. For example, if you have only just launched your project and are trying to understand what social network to focus on.
Tips for Crafting Unique Posts
Say no to posting exact content to all the social channels. Instead, focus on publishing different messages on different social media platforms. Through your content, you provide a message to your audience that can be dramatically different on Twitter and Facebook.
Here are some tips that will help you to avoid senseless duplicates of your content and to start posting your content more efficiently.
Before you begin cross-posting content, you first need to find out how each individual social network is functioning, and its unique capabilities and features.
Find all the network-specific features you are available to use. You’ll need to learn this in order to determine how you can optimize each post for each network, and/or how you can make your individual post be successful on each.
Not every post will work on every social channel – and that’s normal. Think over your overall strategy, your network strategy, and the tone of the network.
For example, if you’re doing a fun, behind-the-scenes post of your team’s corporate party, it might not make sense to publish a photo on your company’s LinkedIn page – but it could be a great post for Instagram or even your brand’s Instagram Story.
3. Understand your audience on each channel
Your followers on every social media marketing channel are likely different, even if they all belong to your target audience overall. LinkedIn, for example, typically include people with business interest, and Instagram has a younger audience than some other channels. You should customize your content appropriately.
To help you understand who is currently following you on each platform, learn the insights from your analytics data. Most platforms’ native analytics can show you insights like the demographics, interests, language, and locations of your current followers. Use this information to your advantage, adjusting the cross-posted content for each audience as appropriate.
4. Optimize posts for each network
Once you’re familiar with how each of the social media channels you’re posting to works, you’ll want to optimize the posts you’re cross-posting for each specific network.
This is where the tips we just talked about come in handy. You can customize each post to work with the network you’re posting to, giving you an opportunity to perform your creative skills and use those network-specific features. This will make your publications more dynamic and show your audience you know what you’re doing.
Some posts will be good to keep mostly the same with tiny changes. This covers shortening or lengthening captions to meet character restrictions, adding or taking away hashtags, and playing with wording. For example, you may post longer posts on LinkedIn or Facebook and shorter ones on Twitter.
Also, think over which formats work best on each channel, and for your audience as well. For example, if you see that audience on Facebook Page reacts well to links (and they wanted to keep their Facebook as a resource for links to content), so when post more the blog articles on Facebook. If you assume that this information will have a success on Instagram as well, adjust it and monitor the results.
5. Use a different call to action
To make each post unique, try to send a different call to action each time you create a new message. You can try to create the call to action based on which network you’re using. For example, if you’re promoting a professional networking platform, you may use a call to action that offers signing up for your company’s monthly newsletter. If you’re using a social media network, you might think over about using a call to action that offers following your company’s website.
6. Schedule according to each network’s peak time
The last consideration of correct cross-posting on social media is to schedule publications for the individual peak times on each social media network – and again, appropriate to your unique audience on each.
This will ensure you’re posting when the most amount of people will see it, per network, maximizing your opportunities for great reach.
Hopefully, these tips will help you get a little more boost with your cross-posting on social media, and avoid the seemingly time-saving mistake of simply automating your tweets to post to Facebook, or your Instagram Stories content to cross over to Facebook Stories.
Wrapping Up
Cross-posting has a bad reputation in the social media marketing world because it is often implemented wrong. However, when used correctly, cross-posting provides you a way to boost the reach of the key content you want to share while also keeping your social calendars full.
As long as you’re trying to engage in high-quality and intentional cross-posting, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use this strategy to engage your audience and keep your followers delighted. Just remember to apply the right strategies and tools so that you could have the amazing results you’re looking for.
