When social media marketing first came about, brands were apprehensive about making the switch from traditional marketing.
However, years later, social media has proven time and time again that it is here to stay.
Social media is one of marketing’s greatest evolutions. But what does that mean for brands?
A lot of creative thinking, a solid social media strategy, and a lot of posting. Now, if you think this only increases your marketing team’s workload. We’re here to shut that thought down.
Yep, you read that right. We’re here to tell you about our savior: Cross-posting *cue a harmonious choir singing Hallelujah*.
Cross-posting is one of the smartest tricks that the best social media marketers use to keep their social media interesting, consistent, and up to date.
Read on to find out what cross-posting is and why you need to include it in your marketing plan.
What is Cross-Posting?
Cross-Posting is the practice of using the same content but utilizing it on various platforms with certain tweaks that are related to the platform.
Take, for example, a blog post written on your website for SEO; this can be cross-posted as important one-liners that can be posted onto your Twitter platform, or it could have an image that goes up on your social media with the blog link in the bio.
Brands or businesses can crosspost on as many social platforms as they’d like. It widens up the opportunities of their social media presence.
How to Include Social Media Cross-Posting in Your Social Media Strategy?
So how does one go about including cross-posting into their social media plans? Well, this is where your social media strategy steps in.
So before we get to cross-posting and understand how to fit it into our social media plans, let’s figure out what a social media strategy is.
Interesting Read: Use this Social Media Strategy Template to Help You Save Time
A social media strategy outlines your business goals with your social media. It addresses the methods or practices you will use to reach these goals and the metrics needed to track your progress to reaching these goals.
A great social media plan identifies your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) offline and addresses these online. Once these are identified, and an ideation plan is set in place, you evaluate where your audience is online and begin your content creation. Tracking better metrics and evaluating your outcome can be done effectively when you define your team’s roles and responsibilities.
Having all of this in place acts as a guideline for figuring out exactly how much content can be used for cross-posting. This gives your social media manager an outline for the outcome of the cross-posting strategy.
To come up with an effective content strategy, it’s helpful to understand your audience and then get started. While all of this may seem a little overwhelming, we promise it isn’t as intimidating as it looks once you begin planning your social media.
The most straightforward way to do so is by working on your Pillar Content and then understanding what to cross-post on which platform.
Pillar content or Content Buckets are marketing terms to identify a topic or theme for your social media to create content with.
These topics or themes can be specific to your audience’s engagement with online or a brand niche that reflects your business.
Having pillar content makes it easy to identify talking points within your audience. This also helps understand which pillars can go onto which platform on your social media based on objectives, tone of voice, etc.
Once you have set your pillar content and identified the content you need to create, all that is left is figuring out the frequency and time to post.
But this doesn’t mean you need to come up with a different strategy for different platforms. All you have to do is just introduce a cross-platform social media strategy into your social media plan.
But, before you do that, it helps to know how to cross-post effectively. We know what you’re thinking ‘It’s just repurposing content.’ How hard can that be? Well, in theory. It’s simple enough. But putting it into action incorrectly can make your brand look amateur and spammy.
This is why we put down a couple of platform restrictions to help you navigate this new territory.
What Are The Best Practices For Cross-Posting On Social Media?
While there are no hard and fast set rules for cross-posting on social media, there are restrictions related to each platform.
1. Don’t cross-post everything
Identify the tone of voice used on all social media platforms and align your content to fit this tone. Usually, Facebook cross-posting is the easiest platform to create content for since it is the most versatile allowing the least restrictions. But that shouldn’t mean cross-posting everything on all platforms.
2. Pay attention to character count and links
While LinkedIn and Facebook allow for long-form content along with videos or photographs, Twitter restricts your character limit to 280 characters, including links.
Instagram allows you to publish wordy descriptions, but it doesn’t allow for clickable links in the descriptions. One needs to navigate their audience to their link in bio. Instagram’s 2022 update will enable brands also to use their stories to add links without a minimum follower count.
3. Choose the correct visuals
Each platform has a preferred image and video ratio.
While Instagram has scrollable carousel posts, Facebook pages upload multiple images as a group of photos. Instagram also gives you the option to use a mix of videos and photos on the same carousel, which is not supported on Facebook.
Understanding these restrictions can help you plan your cross-platform social media posting.
4. Leverage automation for consistency
It gets difficult for brand managers and social media marketers to post something every couple of hours to the tee. That’s why it is more effective to leave the monotonous work to social media automation tools.
Is There An App For Cross-Posting On Social Media?
The activity of cross-posting can seem mundane and sometimes confusing because of either how monotonous it is or how confusing it can get with multiple platforms.
Once you have identified your main content for social media and have decided what needs to be published, you can pick days and times to cross-post on social media.
Since this process is monotonous, it helps to use an app that can cross-post on social media for you, such as SocialPilot. It is a budget-friendly social media automation tool that enables you to do more than just Instagram and Facebook cross-posting.
SocialPilot is more than just a social media cross-posting tool. It can be utilized for content creation, scheduling, analytics, and listening as well.
All of these features help understand what your audience is looking for on which platform, and where is the best place for what content to be posted.
How To Cross-Post On Social Media Using SocialPilot?
Step 1: Write content you choose to go up on different social media platforms into the content box.
Step 2: You can tweak content slightly for Facebook or Instagram
Step 3: Select an image, video, GIF, emoji, or even your own design from Canva to add to the post.
Step 4: Choose the accounts and platforms on which you’d like your content posted
Step 5: Choose when you’d like your post to go up on your social media channels
And, voila!
Using SocialPilot not only publishes the right things for your brand but also helps you keep your content live during times when your audience is online.
You can also use Facebook cross-posting since it can be easy for users if they are used to the native platform. The Meta Business Suite can be used as a social media cross-posting tool. It can be accessed from a desktop or phone via an app and can be effective for Instagram and Facebook cross-posting.
Pros And Cons Of Cross-Platform Social Media Posting.
While Cross-posting has an upside to it, it also comes with its downsides.
To understand that, one must understand the key to platform-specific social media content.
The key to social media today is that it helps have a uniform voice across all social media platforms while still embracing the platform’s expectancy.
A platform like LinkedIn may have a more business crowd and Instagram may have a younger generation. It helps to have a consistency in your brand’s communication so people can identify your brand based on your content, no matter which platform you are on.
Once you take this into consideration, you can effectively define the pros and cons of cross-platform social media posting.
Pros of cross-platform social media posting
- It saves time for brands, by not creating different social media plans for every platform.
- It helps maintain the uniformity of the brand across different social media platforms.
- It allows brands to focus on creating better content since they can use social media automation tools to execute the monotonous work.
Cons of cross-platform social media posting
- All posts cannot be used across all platforms. It could also seem like spam for followers who follow you on all platforms.
- If cross-posting on social media is done incorrectly, it could come off as irrelevant for your followers.
- One needs to pay attention to each platform’s restrictions such as image, character count, clickable links, etc.
So, Is Cross-Posting Good?
Cross-posting takes away the pressure of creating original content for every single platform. All it really requires is for you to understand the best way your content can be represented to different audiences on different platforms.
Consolidating your overall content plan and placing it wisely gives your content more exposure, hence reaching a wider audience. This enables your brand to become more popular with different segments of people.
It also allows for you and your team to spend all this time focusing on creating more valuable ideas and campaigns.
