Social media has become an essential tool for promoting websites, running marketing campaigns, providing customer support, getting out your fresh blog post and much more. Having an effective social media strategy is crucial if you intend to run a successful online business and engage with your potential clients.
Unfortunately, using social media can be complex because of the wide variety of platforms, tools, and techniques that are available. Understanding how to share your content across channels effectively is not always clear, which may eventually lead to a loss of brand reputation and customer loyalty.
To give you more insight into using social media, this article will take a closer look at the benefits and drawbacks of “cross-posting” the same content across different social media channels.
What is Cross-Posting?
Cross-posting is the act of creating content and posting it across multiple social media platforms. For example, you could write a blog post and submit the same piece to a variety of social media websites including LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Google+. This can be effectively used with a posting schedule, helping you streamline your social media strategy across all platforms.
The Benefits of Cross-posting on Social Media
Cross-posting makes it easier to remain active on social media. Social media accounts that are active tend to be more popular because users enjoy receiving a regular stream of content and updates, especially if you are a reputable brand. Hence, a lack of social activity may lead to a loss of engagement and an eventual decline in subscriber rate.
Cross-posting content allows you to take a single piece of content and use it across many different platforms – keeping your social media accounts active and healthy. This can help you to retain your existing audience, broaden your reach and attract new followers.
You can save an enormous amount of time
If you are a busy entrepreneur or a manager of a small business, you probably have a lot on your plate and overlook multiple business channels. You may not have the time required to write unique content that is specifically targeting different social media networks. Cross-posting allows you to create one great piece of content and push it out to multiple social media platforms in a small amount of time. You can also invest more time creating a single piece of “great” content instead of three or four “mediocre” pieces that are designed for different platforms.
Greater exposure for your content
Many social media users have a strong preference for certain platforms. For example, a user may log into LinkedIn or Twitter every day but rarely uses Facebook. You can only be assured of reaching these types of users by posting your content “everywhere.” What’s the point of spending hours writing an incredible blog post if only a handful of people get to read it?
More user engagement, more connections and more followers
Active social media channels grow rapidly and gain more followers. By regularly posting content to all platforms you can reach more people, grow your online presence and drive website traffic.
The Drawbacks of Cross-posting
Your content may not be appropriate for every social media platform
The users of different social media platforms have different goals and preferences. A LinkedIn user is typically looking for content that is highly informative, unique and useful for their professional development. A Facebook user may be looking for entertaining or mildly interesting content.
The content that you create for these platforms should be tailored to suit the audience that each platform attracts. The length, tone, language and topic of your content will determine how appropriate it is for each channel. If you post an inappropriate or irrelevant piece of content to a particular social platform it may be ignored or worse – it could cause followers to unsubscribe.
Different social media networks also use different vocabularies. For example, Twitter has “retweets” and Facebook has “reactions.” If you accidentally post a piece of content to Facebook that asks people to “retweet” your post, they are likely to realize that the content is re-posted. This can make the piece appear “spammy” and tarnish the reputation of your social channel and overall brand authority.
Dedicated followers may feel cheated
Some followers may be subscribed to more than one of your social media channels. If they begin to see the same re-hashed content appear across multiple platforms, they may begin to feel like they are being sent spam. This is a substantial problem because these dedicated followers are often your best and loyal customers.
Users feel less inclined to engage with your channel
If users realize that your content is posted to dozens of other media channels, they are likely to encounter the feeling that your account is automated and does not have a unique "personality." Their willingness to engage with your social media channel is reduced if they believe it is just another location where you repost your rehashed content.
Using Cross-promotion Instead of Cross-posting
If you are concerned about the negative impact of cross-posting content, you can use cross-promotion instead. Cross-promotion uses one piece of content posted to one or two social media platforms, which then gets promoted across other channels.
This approach means that you are not spamming the same piece of content across multiple networks, but you are making all of your followers aware of the content. Care must still be taken to tailor your message to the audience on each social platform. It can be a very practical approach and avoids some of the negative aspects of cross-posting content.
