Love it or hate it, social media is an integral part of 21st-century life. For businesses, it’s an effective tool for connecting with customers online and building a brand identity in a competitive landscape.
Yet for many marketers, it can be challenging to manage multiple social media accounts. When you’re busy developing innovative new fitness apps or revolutionizing the vegan skincare industry, creating separate posts for Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the rest is probably the last thing on your mind.
The solution? Cross posting. This time-saving tactic is the secret of social media managers who want to maximize limited resources while still engaging with audiences.
If you manage multiple accounts on different channels, cross posting can help you extend your brand’s reach and spread marketing messages effectively.
However, a silver bullet this is not.
Cross posting is not simply preparing one post and publishing it to all accounts. Do that, and your strategy risks having the opposite effect.
In other words, there is a right and a wrong way to do it. Whether you’re a small business, marketing agency, content creator, or large corporation, here’s how cross posting can benefit you – and how to nail it.
What is Cross Posting All About?
Cross posting is the practice of posting identical or slightly altered content across different social media platforms. More and more social media managers are using the strategy to save time and effort while increasing reach and engagement.
You can cross post nearly any type of content, including:
- Text
- Photos and other graphics
- Polls
- Videos
- Links
- Stories
Cross posting can be done manually by copying and pasting content into each platform. But, of course, the idea is to save time, so you can automate the process using a social media management tool like Bulkly.
The idea of cross posting is that it streamlines your social media management strategy and ensures each channel is kept up to date.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
There are numerous benefits to cross posting on social media, which we’ll explore in the next section. But it’s important to recognize that each platform is unique. That means users on those platforms are unique, too. So understanding how people use each platform and what type of content performs well on each is crucial.
When you understand this and use it to cross post on social media correctly, it’s a game changer.
Understanding the Benefits of Cross Posting
Cross posting can benefit various businesses and brands, including:
- Startups: New businesses with a small marketing budget can use cross posting to boost their reach and engagement at little cost.
- Small businesses: Small businesses are usually run by a small team or just one individual. Cross posting is a lifesaver when juggling social media management and pretty much everything else.
- New brands: Successful cross posting strategies can help you get your brand name out there and build a strong brand identity.
- Content creators and influencers: Sharing content across multiple channels enables content creators and influencers to build their following and reap the subsequent benefits (e.g. more opportunities and better brand deals).
- Bloggers: Cross posting can help bloggers expand their content reach and direct more followers to their blogs.
Whether you’re a business promoting the benefits of omnichannel contact centers or an individual setting up a new fashion label, cross posting on social media will prove equally as effective for growing your brand.
Doing so allows you to reach a larger audience and build a strong brand identity. It also guarantees you’re sharing a consistent message across each platform.
But it’s not necessarily just about reaching a wider audience. Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of cross posting on social media.
Saves Time
Everyone is looking for ways to save time and be more efficient in keeping up with the pace of operations and ever-changing consumer demands.
Whether you’re a small business owner or a social media manager for a larger brand, time is money. If there is a more efficient way of doing something that can free up time for other aspects of your business, then you should be taking advantage of it.
Taking a cross posting approach to social media negates the need to spend hours tailoring unique content to each platform. That said, you will need to make careful tweaks to content – more on this later. But you can create one piece of great content that forms the foundation of posts you publish across your social media accounts. This ultimately saves you time and effort.
Widens Your Reach
As a social media user, do you favor a particular platform? Most marketers and content creators do. And guess what? So does your audience.
For example, some of your target audience might use Instagram and Facebook daily but only occasionally log in to X (aka Twitter) while others will use LinkedIn religiously.
If you want to grow your social media presence, you need to be active across multiple platforms to reach as many people as possible. That means reaching your audience on the platform that they prefer.
But this is also an opportunity to expand your reach to new customers. Each platform has a unique user base with unique interests and demographics. Cross posting will help you tap into these audiences simultaneously, so you can reach more people and increase your online visibility.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Boosts Engagement
As we mentioned, each social media platform is unique in its demographics and features – and that offers you opportunities for better engagement. If you cross post on social media the right way, you can use these features to your advantage. After all, most of them were built with engagement in mind.
So whether users are commenting on posts, sharing and liking content, or using branded hashtags, it can help you generate more followers and build connections with your audience.
Cross posting consistently and connecting with your audience in this way also builds trust with your followers. Ultimately, you are giving your audience more opportunities to engage with the content you put out and connect with your brand.
It can lead to tangible results, too. For example, your website traffic is likely to increase if you give your audience more opportunities to click through to your domain or subdomain.
As well as that, you create a consistent brand identity which customers come to trust. This can increase your following and set you apart from your competitors.
Keeps Your Profiles Active
Anyone running multiple social media accounts will understand how difficult and time consuming this can be. Often, at least one of your social channels becomes neglected. Unfortunately, in the world of social media, any accounts that are not regularly active will disappear from your followers’ feeds.
To avoid this, you need to remain consistent and regularly post to all of your social media accounts. With cross posting, you don’t have the pressure of coming up with new and unique content ideas to regularly post on each platform. In doing so, you can keep your accounts active with minimal effort.
How to Cross Post on Social Media the Right Way
So, you understand what cross posting is and how it can benefit you. But while cross posting is an effective way to widen your reach and keep your social accounts active, there are certain best practices to be aware of.
In this section, we will discuss how to successfully approach your cross posting strategy.
Learn the Nuances of Different Channels
First and foremost, you need to consider which platforms you want to cross post on. Consider where you will find your target audience and what you are aiming to achieve with your social media strategy.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
We’ve said it already and we’ll say it again: each social media platform has its own characteristics. For example, Instagram is a very visual platform and Stories are a huge feature. X, on the other hand, is text-based with a small character limit. So while you might be aware of the best Instagram hacks to boost your profile, it could be worth spending more time learning the nuances of other platforms.
This includes restrictions, features, and best practices. When posting to different social media apps, consider factors like:
- Character limit and caption length
- Image formats and sizes
- Link format (clickable or not)
- Messaging capabilities
- Hashtag usage
- Tone of voice expected by the audience
- Interactive features like polls
Clearly, cross posting is not as straightforward as posting the exact same content to all accounts. While you can begin with the same content and message, it is essential to tailor the content for each platform.
Stay on Schedule
With an effective cross posting strategy, you can create content for multiple platforms and schedule your posts in advance. You might want to push the same (or similar) content across all your accounts simultaneously. However, be aware that you may be able to reach different audiences by publishing at different times on different platforms.
Use social media analytics to learn the best times to post on each channel, and create a content calendar to stay on top of your schedule.
This will increase the chances of your content being seen by the right audience at the right time, and increasing engagement rates as a result. What’s more, publishing at different times on different channels means you avoid saturation, where over-exposure of your content causes your audience to disengage.
Avoid Spamming Your Followers
As we mentioned before, an effective cross posting approach involves tailoring your content to suit the channels you are posting on.
This is important, because posting exactly the same content to all of your channels without any personalization will come across as spammy – to both your audience and the almighty social media algorithms.
Many social media channels are now cracking down on repeated content in a bid to tackle spam. In some cases, this can even get your account suspended.
Engage With Your Audience on Each Platform
When you cross post on social media, make sure to respond to comments and messages on every account. This should form a crucial part of your community management strategy. Because while cross posting helps to increase your reach and engagement, you need to engage back for it to truly be effective.
This tactic gives you greater opportunities to connect with your audience, so make the most of it.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
For example, let’s say you share an article that ends with .io instead of .com. This domain isn’t as well known, so some followers may be apprehensive to click on a link. If a follower comments asking “what does .io mean in URL?”, you need to provide a response.
Replying to comments like this helps build trust with followers. It shows that you care about their thoughts, opinions, and questions, and that your brand is genuine.
Leaving comments or messages unanswered can negatively impact your online reputation. So, be sure to check in on all of your social media channels when cross posting and regularly engage with your audience on each platform.
Put the Posting Process on Auto Pilot
We mentioned that cross posting can save you time, but when done manually, it can be quite an onerous task. Thankfully, the features available with tools like Bulkly help you automate the cross posting process.
These offer features such as:
- Bulk uploading
- Scheduling posts
- Creating hashtags
- Managing multiple social media accounts on one platform
When you decide to cross post on social media, automation can make the process more efficient and amplify the benefits we discussed earlier.
Analyze your Efforts
As with any marketing strategy or new tactic, it’s important that you monitor and track its effectiveness. How else will you know if your social media cross posting strategy is working? Use your preferred social media analytics tool to analyze your performance across each social media channel.
Some key metrics worth tracking include:
- Followers
- Engagement rates
- Reach
- Conversions
- Link clicks
Throughout this process, you might discover some surprising nuggets of information. Maybe you are getting more engagement on X when you considered LikedIn to be your dominant platform. Perhaps your audience is sharing more content on a particular subject or theme.
It’s only when you gain insights like this that you can make improvements. At the end of the day, it’s about creating content that hits the spot with audiences.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
You can use social media analytics to create data-driven content and make better decisions to optimize your cross posting strategy. Remember that social media platforms are ever-evolving, as are the trends and audience preferences that will dictate the type of content that performs well.
You might not get it right straight away, and you will definitely need to be flexible. But with a data-driven approach, you can cross post on social media effectively to meet your wider goals.
Final Thoughts on How to Cross Post on Social Media
There’s no doubt that cross posting on social media can save you time. But more importantly, it can help to widen your reach and increase engagement.
However, there is more to cross posting than publishing one piece of content to all of your channels in one fell swoop.
To nail your strategy, you need to understand the nuances of each platform so you can tailor content accordingly and avoid spamming your followers. Additionally, use the tools at your disposal, whether that’s automation or analytics software. These will significantly boost your efficiency and help you make better decisions about your cross posting strategy.
Cross post on social media the right way with Bulkly and supercharge your social media efforts.
