When it comes to social media marketing, the key goal for most business owners is to save time and resources. But from a customer’s perspective, they generally don’t see everything marketers post on every channel due to sheer lack of time.
Hence, it makes sense to post the same content on different social media platforms so that brands can extend their reach.
However, each social platform is different in terms of format, tonality, and target audience they cater to. Making the same post randomly on all your social media accounts, therefore, just won’t cut the bill.
This is where cross posting on social media comes in. It is an easy and simple way to save time, where you take one piece of content and post it to different social channels.
A great strategy to nail your social media marketing, cross posting simply means creating content and posting the same content on all social media platforms. It helps you save time by eliminating the need to generate unique content for every platform and repurposing what you already have or have created.
To help you get the most out of cross posting as a marketing strategy, this guide aims to tell you all that you need to know about cross-posting different content on social media the right way.
What Is Cross-Posting On Social Media?
Cross-posting on social media apps refers to the process of posting a specific piece of content across various social media platforms, networks, or websites at the same time.
You can do the process manually by simply copying and pasting the written content and using the same images. Alternatively, you can automate the process using various online tools available in the market.
Put simply, cross-posting is nothing but repurposing the same content on different social media apps/platforms. The best part here is that you can cross-post on two, three, or every social media platform you use.
Right from creating engaging graphics to an interactive infographic and crafting the actual content, cross-posting makes you spend less time than you would to create content for multiple social media channels. This is especially useful when the meaning, intent, and crux of the content remain the same.
This ultimately helps you save time, resources, effort, and money, which you can use for other strategic marketing activities.
Who Is Cross-Posting Best For?
Cross-posting on social media platforms is an excellent strategy for individuals, businesses, and influencers who wish to expand their reach organically.
The process allows everyone, including small businesses, bloggers, and large organizations, to expand their reach, increase brand visibility, and improve their online presence with minimal effort.
Here are the benefits of cross-posting:
- Individuals or businesses can use cross-posting to share the content they create with their acquaintances across multiple social media platforms
- Influencers can leverage cross-posting to expand their followers’ reach and grow their following on different social platforms
- Brands can use cross-posting to tailor their content to each specific platform, which can systematically help increase engagement and drive more targeted traffic to their website
- Small businesses can make use of cross-posting for promotions across multiple platforms, thus reaching a wider set of audience
- Large organizations can use cross-posting to build their brand awareness and strengthen their online presence
Benefits Of Cross-posting On Social Media
Wondering why you should be cross-posting on social media in the first place?
Read on to learn the multiple benefits of cross-posting-
Helps You Maintain Multiple Profiles
Most brands today use different social media profiles, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Cross-posting, in this case, is a great way to help you maintain multiple profiles and stay consistent on all of these platforms.
Additionally, having the same message across various social media platforms can be of great advantage to the brand. The uniformity in content helps businesses/brands put across the intended message easily to their consumers.
This kind of uniformity also keeps the message consistent and makes the brand memorable for the audience.
Saves Time
This is another important benefit of cross-posting the content on different social media platforms.
Instead of coming up with all-new content for different social apps, you can simply reuse existing content, thus maintaining your active presence and saving time as well.
Improves Brand Recognition
People today use different social media apps as per their individual preferences. Besides, a maximum number of people from your niche target audience will also be spread across various platforms.
The process of cross-posting allows you to improve brand recognition by extending your reach without having to spend any extra time.
Apart from this, posting content frequently helps you increase engagement on these apps. And more followers mean your audience is more likely to engage with your brand on social media platforms.
Best Practices For Cross-posting On Social Media
If you decide to cross-post multiple social media accounts, the most important thing to keep in mind is to create quality content.
To help you navigate the space better, here are some of the best practices you can follow for cross-posting on social media:
Don’t Focus On Cross-Posting Everything
First and foremost, it is important to identify the tone of voice used on different social media platforms and accordingly align your content to fit the same.
Typically, Facebook cross-posting is the easiest platform to create content for since it is the simplest and most versatile, allowing the least restrictions.
However, that shouldn’t mean cross-posting everything on every platform. Using an effective social media automation tool such as Bulkly can be a good solution here, as it helps you schedule your posts in advance.
With Bulkly, you can not only save time but also ensure that your posts are published at the right time.
Schedule Your Posts
Another best practice for cross-posting is to schedule your social media posts to be published at the most appropriate times. This helps you reach your target audiences when they’re most active on the specific app or platform.
For instance, if you have plans to post the same content on two of the most popular platforms-Facebook and Twitter, at the same time, you may end up reaching the same audience on both platforms. This will significantly limit the effectiveness of your cross-posting efforts.
Scheduling your content to be posted at different times, on the contrary, allows you to reach a unique set of audiences on different platforms to enhance your chances of engagement.
Pick The Right Visuals
We all know the power of a multimedia message, so you want to take advantage of media for your cross-posting social media efforts. But each social media platform has a specific image and video ratio preference for posting. For instance, while Facebook pages upload multiple images as a group of photos, Instagram has scrollable carousel posts.
Likewise, Instagram also gives you the option to use a mix of photos and videos on the same carousel, which is not supported on Facebook. This makes it important to understand these specifications to be able to plan your cross-platform social media posting better.
Tailor Your Content
While it is always easier to share the same content across multiple platforms, what is also important is to tailor the content to suit the preferences of the individual platform’s audience.
The best way to do this is by adapting your message to fit the style and tone of each platform. For instance, the style, tone, and format you use to write on Twitter may differ completely from how you post on LinkedIn.
Apart from this, you also need to make sure to follow the best practice requirements of individual social media platforms when cross-posting. That essentially translates to using appropriate hashtags, tagging accounts, and ensuring that the imagery you use for posting is resized to the right dimensions.
Modify Your Language
Since different social media platforms use different terminologies to refer to the functions and users within that particular platform, it is important to modify the language you use accordingly.
For instance, asking someone to “follow” may work on one platform but not on the other, as it may be better to ask them to “subscribe” on the other platform. In addition to this, you can also make necessary adjustments to help each post feel unique, even if the idea you are putting across is the same.
Besides, remember that rather than posting every single day, the best practice here is to post a few times a week to help your posts seem more varied and useful to the users.
Listen To Audience Feedback
Lastly, your social media audience is your best resource when gauging your cross-posting performance.
All you need to do is listen to your audience’s feedback and remember that your social presence is for them, not you. It is important to watch for any kind of engagement and feedback from your audience to see how they feel about your cross-posts.
When you listen to your audience’s feedback, they’ll let you know if you are right in your cross-posting approach, either directly with comments or indirectly with engagement.
How To Cross-post On Specific Social Media Platforms
Because every social media platform is different from the other, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for cross-posting that works on all platforms.
Using cross-posting strategically means much more than simply copy-pasting the content or using the automatic cross-posting features present in your social media apps.
To get the maximum out of the cross-posting strategy, here are the steps you can follow:
Take Time To Understand Each Platform
Before creating the content for social media apps, it is important to spend some time getting yourself acquainted with each of these platforms.
The best place to start here is to know each platform’s:
- Caption lengths
- Hashtags
- Content formats
- Hashtag limits
- Frequency of posting
Knowing these details will help you strategize from the start and come up with content that’ll easily cross-post on multiple platforms.
Create High-Quality Content
The importance of creating high-value content is huge in cross-posting, especially when you share the content on multiple platforms. When your audience is going to see the same content several times, it needs to be useful for them.
Some of the tips you can follow here to create high-quality content include:
- Consider who your target set of audience is
- Understand the kind of content your audience values, such as advice, information, or humor
- Make sure you create the kind of content they would actually like to see on social media
In a Nutshell
Cross-posting on social media is an excellent strategy that takes away the pressure of coming up with original content for every single app or platform. All it requires to ace the approach is to develop an understanding of the ideal way your content can be presented to different audiences on different social media platforms.
In this post, we have covered the various aspects of cross-posting along with ways to consolidate your overall content plan and place it wisely across social apps to be able to reach a wider set of audience.
Apart from enabling your brand to become more popular with a different set of audiences, the cross-posting approach also allows you to save a great deal of time and focus on creating more strategic and valuable social media campaigns.
However, what is important to remember is that different social apps have different algorithms, best practices, and audience demographics, so it’s crucial to tailor your content and strategy accordingly.