Cross-posting: do’s and don’ts

Imagine that on Christmas Eve, you still miss two vital presents: your son’s and your stepmother’s. To save time, you start thinking about buying the two same presents because the mall is upside down. What a life! 

Then, you stop and think for two minutes straight: can you really give your stepmother bicycle training wheels? You better don’t. What if posting the exact same content on Facebook and Pinterest was as risky as giving her bicycle training wheels? 

Cross-posting is often considered a time-saver, and it is! It helps you display content on different platforms in one click. But you’d better know how to use it right to avoid sinking your social media strategy. Discover cross-posting do’s and don’ts to use your content at best.

What is cross-posting?

This is cross-posting. This practice consists in posting the same content on different social media channels. As you can see, those two posts are exactly the same. 

If they had changed the lines or added tags, it would not have been considered true cross-posting. Why do we choose to tackle this topic? Cross-posting can appear to be dehumanizing… and it is! Most of the time, this practice involves a third-party platform that helps you schedule multi-channel posts. Time-saver or dehumanizing tool? Let’s put our foot in it

Is cross-posting (only) a bad thing?

Cross-posting suffers from a bad reputation. If you share identical posts without any modification on different platforms, your followers might encounter some mistakes on your accounts. 

For instance, Tik Tok posts length is limited to 150 characters, while Instagram posts length can hit 2,200 characters! It means that if you write a post caption of 600 characters, ¾ of your caption will be cropped on Tik Tok. A faux pas with heavy consequences: your caption might cut your sentences or hashtags. But why is cross-posting not just evil? 

Posting the same content through different channels can be the solution if you lack inspiration. It can also help you reach a broader audience. If one user missed your Facebook promotional post, he might come across the promotion on your Instagram post… and vice versa.

What is allowed with cross-posting?

If you want to take the plunge, you’d better take cross-posting with a pinch of salt… What does it mean? We’ll go together across cross-posting good practices to avoid the mistakes listed earlier.

Learn the specificities of each platform 

You might already know that each platform has its own specificities. Let’s get a quick glimpse at 4 of the biggest social networks: 

Facebook

This social network is an excellent place to post if you want to share long-form content. The maximum length for a post is 63,206 characters… but users won’t read it until the end. According to a BuzzSumo report, posts with less than 50 characters are more engaging than long posts. Facebook allows you to post a broad range of content: from videos to textual posts. If you’ve created nice video content and want to display it on your social networks, check the duration of your video. If the platform supports videos that can last for 240 minutes (it’s like watching Titanic and all the commercial breaks), most people will prefer a video that is shorter than a minute (Report from Statista, Italian population 2018).

Instagram

On this social media platform, your caption can be 2,200 characters.You can’t post anything without a visual element: you need to post either a video or a photo. Also, note that Instagram doesn’t allow you to add links to your posts. 

LinkedIn

On this professional platform, make sure to post content that’s relevant for business usage. Long-form content performs well on this network. Don’t hesitate to write down paragraphs! 

Twitter

Brevity is required on Twitter. You can’t go above 280 characters. Be concise and provide forceful content! Links are welcome on Twitter. In a nutshell, take a close look at the platform’s specificities: the audience can differ, the users’ expectations may be different, the content displayed is often limited on some networks...

Personalize and optimize your content for each channel

Now that you know better about cross-posting, let’s see how you could make each platform’s content unique without losing much time. Sometimes, all you have to do is making small changes: 

• Personalize the caption: add links or hashtags to adapt your content to each platform
  
  
• Change the angle of the picture
  
  
• Adapt the tone: know your audience to display content that really matters to them

Save time and schedule your posts in advance

Use platforms such as Hootsuite, Buffer or HubSpot to schedule your posts in advance. Take into consideration:

• The network peak’s time. According to Hootsuite’s latest report on this topic, we can say that the best time to post on: Facebook is on Tuesdays and Thursdays, between 8 AM and 12 PM. Instagram is on Wednesdays at 11 AM. Twitter is on Mondays and Thursdays at 8 AM. LinkedIn is one Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 9 AM. 
  
  
• The delay between your posts. Your multi-channel posts won’t help you reach a broader audience if you post the same content, at the same time, on every platform!

Find the ideal balance

Cross-posting can help you if you take the time to implement it correctly! Don’t fall into the trap of what’s easiest… it won’t help you engage with more people if they see 10 times the same content. 

What if the problem was not that you lack ideas? What if you just needed to understand how to use an idea to its fullest? We’d be glad to help you optimize them so that you could decline your ideas in many forms.