Newsflash! You don’t need to spend a lot of time posting on social media. Social media marketers are quickly adopting cross-posting as a strategy to save time and reduce the amount of work required to schedule social posts.
Cross-posting from Facebook to Instagram, Twitter to Pinterest or vice versa is a great way to start your social media management.
Bonus: Read the step-by-step guide to social media strategy with pro tips for growing your social media presence.
What is cross-posting?
Cross-posting refers to the practice of sharing similar content on multiple social media platforms. This tactic is used by social media managers to save time and money. You no longer need to create a new social media update every time you post.
Cross-posting can be a time-saver for social managers because it streamlines your posting strategy, allows you to reuse content across multiple platforms and keeps your social media channels updated.
Crossposting can be a great way to increase brand awareness. It allows you to share your message on multiple channels, where it is more likely to be seen by your target audience. Crossposting can be a great way to increase your message and content’s visibility, with Americans spending on average two hours per day on social media.
Crossposting is good for who?
Start-ups with smaller budgetsFounders of startups and other businesses who run social media in addition to all elseNew brands who haven’t created a lot yetTime-conscious creators who wish to save hours on creating engaging, compelling content
Is there an app for cross-posting?
Yes! Yes! This allows you to create social media posts without having to start over every time.
How to use Hootsuite’s cross-posting feature
Log in to your Hootsuite Account and navigate to the Composer Tool. Add your social copy to the Initial Content box. Edit and refine your post by clicking on the appropriate icon next to Initial content.
Cross-posting sounds simple: you’re sharing your content on different networks. It sounds simple enough, but how difficult can it be? Cross-posting is not easy, but there are important caveats that marketers must understand.
You can look robotic or untrustworthy by posting the same message to all networks without changing it to meet their specific needs.
Learn how to communicate with multiple networks
Each social media platform is unique. Pinterest is filled with Pins, Twitter has tons of Tweets, Instagram has lots of Stories. Cross-posting is a way to learn the language of each social media platform.
Let’s suppose you own a new coffee shop and are looking to share a post on social media to reach customers on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Every social network has its own set of posting parameters, so your cross-posting strategy must take this into consideration.
Twitter has a character limit of 280 characters, while Facebook has a limit of 2,000 characters and Instagram has 2,200. So make sure you adjust your cross-posted content accordingly.
Let’s say you want to add images and videos in your social media marketing. We think so! It’s important to be familiar with the sizes of images for each channel. Also, consider whether accounts that you intend on tagging in your posts may already have an active account on that channel.
It’s not worth creating a handle tag on Twitter for a brand and then cross-posting it to Instagram only to find out they don’t have an Instagram account.
Here are some other parameters to consider when creating content for cross-posting:
Clickable linksHashtag usageVocabularyAudienceMessagingCTA
Pre-plan posts
Social media timing is crucial. It is important to know the best times for posting on each platform. Then, schedule your posts using a social media management tool like Hootsuite (hint hint).
Hootsuite Composer comes with a built in feature that will tell you when is the best time for you to post social media content to your channels. It also lets you customize one post to be shared on multiple social networks, as mentioned previously. Bulk scheduling social media posts can be done to save even more time.
The “one and done rule” is a good example.
Do you know the guy who tells the exact same story at every gathering and everyone stops listening? This is how your audience reacts when you repeat content. They feel like they would rather be somewhere else.
Post different messages on different platforms. You run the risk that your audience will see the same message repeatedly and become bored or frustrated. Your social media strategy could also appear flat and boring.
You might accidentally share the same post to all your social media channels. This could lead you to invite your followers on Facebook and Instagram to retweet or pin your post. It is possible to lose a part of your caption or tag a handle on one platform but not another, or your visual content.
Instagram allows you to link your profile with other social media accounts, and then automatically shares each post (alongside its caption and hashtags), to all of these accounts.
These posts may not always go as you expect. Insta posts that are shared to Twitter include a link, but not the actual photo.
You miss out on engagement that a visual could generate and possibly even part of your caption. This resulted in a rushed post that will not impress your followers and inspire them to click.
You’re likely to be noticed if you aren’t providing the best content for your followers on one platform and then shortchanging them by sharing it on another. A post with a cut-off caption and a strangely cropped photo looks unprofessional at best, and spammy at the worst.
Cross-posting saves time, but it doesn’t cost you your audience’s attention or respect. It’s not fair to expect your audience to care about the content of what you post on their account.
Bonus: Read the step-by-step guide to social media strategy with pro tips for growing your social media presence.
Get the guide for free right now!
Social media is no different from baseball. There’s no room for crying. Not only will your followers notice if you repost the same content, but so will the platforms.
Twitter is one channel that has limited automation and similar content in an effort to combat spam accounts and bots.
Repetitive content could result in disengaged followers and even account suspension. Be sure to follow anti-spam rules and ensure that every message you send is thoughtfully written.
Cross-posting can be a great way for you to express your creativity and create dynamic content that stands out from the rest. You can add or remove hashtags, change the text, or format images to meet the needs of your target audience.
You should remember that different demographics are active on different platforms, so don’t let your creative juices get too wild. LinkedIn users, for example, are 43% male and 57% female on a global basis, with the majority of their audience being over 30 years old.
Instagram is a more inclusive platform than Instagram, with more women using it than men. Their largest demographic is those aged under 30. LinkedIn users will most likely prefer a different post to those who like it on Instagram.
Warby Parker, an eyewear brand, is skilled at adapting its content to fit each user’s needs. A post about a mural being installed at their Fort Worth store was shared on Twitter as a photo. They also used Instagram to combine multiple photos or videos into one post.
They shared more than just the “after” photos. Instead, they showed a video of the mural being built and encouraged viewers to swipe to see it in action.
A new mural was installed at the WestBend store in Fort Worth.
https://t.co/fOTjHhzcp3 pic.twitter.com/MLHosOMkVg
Warby Parker (@WarbyParker), April 5, 2018,
This post is on Instagram
Warby Parker (@warbyparker), shared this post
A post can look polished or sloppy if you make small changes. Moe the Corgi, for example, doesn’t have an Instagram account but does have a Twitter handle. Warby Parker could have copied their caption from Instagram. It would make their tweet seem more serious.
Happy Friday
https://t.co/GGC66wgUuz pic.twitter.com/kNIaUwGlh5
Warby Parker (@WarbyParker), April 13, 2018,
This post is on Instagram
Warby Parker (@warbyparker), shared this post
Analyze cross-posting
If you don’t analyze your data, how will you develop a cross-posting strategy that works? You can use your social media analytics to determine if your campaigns are achieving the desired results. Cross-posting can increase or decrease engagement.
Hootsuite’s analytics provides a clear and detailed overview of key metrics on social media, which allows you to make data-driven decisions regarding your cross-posting strategy.
A social listening tool like HootsuiteInsights can be used to collect sentiment. You want to find a sweet spot for cross-posting content that is sufficient to achieve your goals but not too strong to make audiences feel you’re too strong.
Hootsuite allows you to cross-post on social media in a professional way and saves time when managing your social media presence. You can schedule and edit posts across all social networks from one dashboard. You can also monitor sentiment and engage your audience. Get it today for free.
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Hootsuite makes it easy to manage all of your social media from one place, and you can save time.
It’s free to try >> A guide for cross-posting on social media (without looking spammy).
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