Cross-posting – not worth taking the easy route.
October 15, 2015
I sometimes wonder why some applications encourage you to do 'one click' to send your message out to all of your social media platforms. You probably have a number of the same followers on the various social sites, so wouldn't it get aggravating to see the same message from someone five times? However, it's not a simple answer. You may not have the same followers at each place and you don't want anyone to miss anything. 'Cross-posting', as it is known as, does make one look lazy. It is the simplest and fastest way to get your work done, but it looks like you just don't want to take the time to make it interesting or exactly what your followers want. Cross-posting also annoys your visitors if they can see you are blatantly cross-posting. For example, sending you tweets to Facebook so they are full of # and @ symbols; the links may work now in Facebook but my experience is they often don't. Or if someone clicks on a hashtag to see your extra photos only to find they don't have an Instagram account and that is where you linked to.
'Cross Promoting' on the other hand, is taking your same message and tweaking it a bit to keep people reading it (even if they have seen it before). As @eB2B_Cloud tweeted, “Repurposing content is more than just reposting content.”
On http://linkhumans.com/blog/cross-post-social-media, they suggest you can cross-promote by changing the caption, and best of all - change your image. A bit more work again, but they say people respond mostly to images on social media. Let's face it, many people don't really read much. They read the first few lines (or words) and move on. But we are drawn to pictures, videos, and apparently what attracts us most is faces. So try to get the pictures of people out there as often as you can.
An article on https://designschool.canva.com/blog/visual-marketing/ goes on to also explain that people also respond in different ways to the colour you use in your message. Apparently blues and whites are preferable as they often mean 'freshness and clean living' (they suggest that this may be why Facebook and Twitter are so blue), while other colours such as reds and browns should be avoided. (Fortunately for me, our corporate branding is blue! Maybe somebody was thinking way ahead when they used that for branding.)
Another way to cross-promote and keep people looking is to stagger your posts. Even if they are much the same, if they are not all popping in all at once (to the people who are always checking), then it's better. And a good rule of thumb is to know your followers. If you can't meet their needs, reduce the number of social sites you are working with and put the effort into making your posts have some value. Even though social media looks like it is for the masses, we are all in it trying to find some individuality. The whole system allows us to customize our daily experiences, we want to feel you are reaching out to us. If we don't get that feeling, we will move on.
