Every year, a new digital platform begins to thrive. Therefore, savvy entrepreneurs and social media marketers should tailor their content on each platform to their target audience.
However, there are many primary and practical concepts on this topic that marketers need to understand! What exactly is cross-posting on social media? What are the pros and cons? Best practices? And much more.
What’s Cross-Posting?
If you’re familiar with social media marketing careers, you’ve probably heard this term before. Cross-posting is nothing more than posting similar content on multiple social media platforms.
For example, if you have a great blog post, you can post it on all your social networks. This technique provides an easy way to post content in multiple places without much extra effort. Social media managers use this technique to save time and resources.
In addition to saving time, cross-posting is a highly effective tactic for social media managers because it
- Helps streamline your posting strategy
- Allows you to restructure your content
- Keeps your social channels up to date
Why Do People Cross-Post?
Cross-posting is beneficial if you want to increase your brand awareness because it provides a unique opportunity to share your message on multiple platforms, increasing the chance of being seen by your target audience. With the average Australian spending nearly six hours on social media per week, cross-posting is a great way to draw more attention to your message and content.
Whether it’s an influencer campaign or a simple ad, many blogs and posts have the potential to work on more than one channel. Cross-platform social media posting is a great time and cost saver, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Instead of investing in unique content for each social media platform, you can repurpose content to reach a broader audience.
Pros of Cross-Posting on Social Media
Save time
Business owners are usually busy with the daily tasks of their business. Cross-posting means saving time.
Better reach
Cross-posting is one of the best ways to distribute content across all platforms and reach a maximum number of platform-specific users.
Active contribution
Cross-posting is a valuable tool that allows you to keep your social accounts active without running out of ideas.
More followers and engagement
Cross-posting lets you expose your brand to the largest possible audience by staying active on multiple social platforms.
It’s almost a must that you tailor your content to each audience on each social channel.
Cons of Cross-Posting on Social Media
While cross-posting content on social media has many benefits, it also has drawbacks if you do not approach the task correctly. If you make cross-posting mistakes, you’ll alienate your audience, come across as lazy, or just plain rude. So make sure you do not make the following mistakes:
- Inappropriate format. Pay attention to structures when cross-posting on different platforms. Otherwise, your posts will look out of place on almost all platforms except the originating platform.
- The audience may feel cheated. Your audience has the right to think you aren’t investing more time in creating unique content. Use your social media accounts for different messages and goals.
- You’re cross-posting at the wrong time. Every social media channel has an ideal time to get maximum exposure. Find the best time for each channel and post accordingly.
- Make your posts look artificial and robotic. One of the best ways to be social is to humanise your brand and let people know there’s a real person behind the scenes who wants to communicate with them.
Cross-Posting Best Practices
When it comes to cross-posting on social media, there are a number of best practices you should follow to make sure you’re on the right track.
#1 Use The Correct Platform
Not every post is appropriate for all social platforms. While Instagram and Facebook are more conversational, LinkedIn is home to occupation-related content. A selfie that does well on Facebook and Instagram may not have the same impact on LinkedIn! When planning your posts, you also need to consider the appropriate tone of content for each social network.
The type of content on each social channel can change from one platform to the next. The same goes for many other parameters, such as character limits and the best time to post. So there’s a lot to learn about cross-posting on social media.
#2 Schedule Your Posts in Advance
For this purpose, you can use tools that automatically post on your behalf. It’s not much work to set up and connect all your social media accounts and set admin privileges. Once you have all the correct settings in place, cross-posting will be easier and faster.
#3 Don’t Cross-Post Everything
There’s a reason why a variety of social media channels flourish. Each platform works differently, and each has its own audience. For example, people flock to TikTok looking for funny video content. On Pinterest, they look for food, fashion and home inspiration.
Brands must find an ideal balance for cross-posting on social media, using it strategically rather than posting all content on all channels by default.
#4 Listen to Audience Feedback
When measuring your cross-posting performance, your audience is one of the best evaluation tools. Pay attention to your audience’s engagement and feedback to determine how they feel about your cross-posts. They will tell you directly through comments or indirectly with feedback if you are using cross-posting correctly.
#5 Consider Correct Format & Character Count
Each social media channel has different rules regarding character limits, tone of voice, length of the post, number of hashtags and image formatting. While you can publish long posts on Facebook, Twitter limits your content to 280 characters! On Twitter, it’s common to use one or two hashtags. Instagram, however, allows you to use 30 hashtags.
You can share the same message, image, or video on multiple social profiles simultaneously, but make sure your investment is up to the standard and format of each social network. On Instagram, you can post wordy descriptions but clickable links are not allowed in stories. You need to direct the audience to the link in the bio. The 2022 Instagram update also allows brands to use their stories to add links without requiring a minimum number of followers.
#6 Choose the Right Visuals
Each social media platform has a preferred ratio of photos to videos. While Instagram allows scrollable carousel posts, Facebook pages upload multiple images as a group of photos. On Instagram, you can also use a mix of videos and images in a carousel, which isn’t possible on Facebook.
You need to consider these limitations when planning your cross-platform social media posting.
#7 Best Posting Frequency Of Each Social Platform
Each social network has its own posting frequency based on the platform’s lifespan of content. Twitter is known for its fast-paced nature. Therefore, it is advisable to post several times a day!
However, if you plan to do the same on other social networks like Pinterest, there might be some issues. For example, the lifespan of content on Pinterest is up to six months. Therefore, posting one pin daily might be more than enough; otherwise, you would overwhelm your audience.
How To Optimise Content For Each Network
Once familiar with each platform, you can optimise your cross-posting content. You can use tools that help you automatically post to a specific social platform. These tools add momentum to your posts and show your audience that you care about them.
Some posts work well when shared across all social networks, while others require significant adjustments for the different networks, such as
- Adjusting the wording
- Adding or removing hashtags
- Shortening or lengthening captions
Sometimes cross-posting on social media requires a complete rewrite, depending on which network it will be published to. Remember that you can use network-specific tools.
Also, consider what formats are appropriate for your audience on each network. Here are some quick tips to help you better understand each platform for your cross-posting strategy.
- Keep it short: You can post more than 63,206 characters in a Facebook post caption, but it is advisable to limit that number to ~50 for maximum engagement.
- Use visual content: Videos are the best performing post type on Facebook. The optimal length of a Facebook video is typically between two and five minutes.
- 1-2 Hashtags: Studies show that Facebook posts with one or two hashtags get better interactions on average.
Instagram posts are usually accompanied by an image or video.
- Use Stories: Stories work much better on Instagram than on other platforms. However, keep in mind that your stories should be mobile-friendly and include vertical images, as the app is primarily used on mobile devices.
- Nine hashtags: While nine hashtags are the optimal length, Instagram allows up to 30.
- 138 to 150 characters: Although the upper limit for captions on Instagram is 2,200 characters, your posts will perform best if you limit the character count for your captions to 138 to 150.
- Quality: On LinkedIn, the quality of posts is the most important thing. If you have a long, informative blog, LinkedIn is the best place to post it. Visuals are not essential but are recommended to boost performance.
- Long and useful posts: Long content with multiple paragraphs often gets the best results.
- 100-140 characters: LinkedIn has increased the character limit for posts from 1300 to 3000. However, the typical length for a post on LinkedIn is between 100 and 140 characters. Using a professional tone of voice is also best, as this is a professional platform.
Bottom Line
Cross-posting on social media, when done right, can significantly improve your social media presence. Not only can you save time, but you can also reduce the time it takes to create and deliver content to all your social media channels. To that end, you’ll need a social media scheduling tool that eliminates content creation and scheduling hassles.
Beyond a basic understanding of cross-posting and best practices for doing it correctly, there’s much more to consider as you develop and refine your social media strategy. For example, what app should you use for cross-posting on social media, depending on your business?
Contact us, and we will help you get a better idea!
At BroadWeb, we will help you choose the proper social channels based on where your potential customers are.
