Best Practices for Cross Posting On Social Media Correctly

21 Mar Best Practices for Cross Posting On Social Media Correctly

Cross posting content on social media is a simple way to save time. You take one piece of content and post it to all your social channels. It seems like it should be easy peasy – but its a practice that can go very wrong and make your accounts look like a mess. I’m here to teach you how you can begin cross posting on social media the right way.

Stepping Up Your Social Media Cross Posting Game

Cross posting on social media is a great solution for brands and business that:

• Have small budgets and can’t invest to more robust strategies
• Entrepreneurs who are handing social media themselves and are short on time
• Don’t have the ability/resources to create TONS of content
• Businesses that just need social media to maintain an image and be present online

Cross posting means that you’re taking one piece of content or message and sharing it across all your social media channels. There are ways to cross post more efficiently and to bring you the most benefit. It’s a big pet peeve of mine to go on a brand’s social media networks and see that accounts are just lazily connected. Please don’t do this! Instead use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or AgoraPulse to set up your cross posting correctly.

Once you’re in the grove of things you can step up your cross posting game and use each network to your advantage using the best practices we’ll go over below.

1. Learn The Language Of Each Social Media Network

Before you begin correctly cross posting content on social media you must first learn how each individual social media network operates and it’s capabilities. Learn all the network specific tools you have available to use. You’ll need to figure this out in order to decide how you can optimize each post for each network or how you can make your individual post work on each network. We’ll get into more details about this later in this post.

2. Does The Post Belong On This Channel?

Not every post will work on each social media network – and that’s okay. Take your overall strategy and your network strategy into consideration. Also take the tone of the network into consideration. For example – if you’re doing a fun behind the scenes post of your team’s lunch spread – it might not make sense on your LinkedIn page, while this can be great content for you Instagram post or Instagram Story. This also gives you the opportunity to get a little creative if you do want to post the same content on each network, more about that in the next section.

3. Optimize Content For Each Network

Once you’re familiar how each of the networks you’re posting to works, you’ll want to optimize the content you are cross posting on each network. This is where the steps we just talked about come in handy. This is where you transform each post to coincide and really work with the network you’re posting to. It can be an opportunity to flex your skills and use those network specific tools to make your posts more dynamic and show your audience you know what you’re doing.

Some posts will be fine to keep mostly the same with small tweaks. This includes shortening or lengthening captions to meet character limits, adding or taking away hashtags, and playing with wording. For example, you may post longer captions on LinkedIn or Facebook and shorter ones on Twitter. Other posts will be complete revamps considering what network they’ll be posted to. This is where you can take advantage of network specific tools. In the example below I am asking my followers to join my list. With my Twitter post I used a Twitter Card, while on Facebook I went with an image and a link within the caption (I also changed the wording a little).

Sign up to my mailing list for to receive real #socialmedia tips in your inbox each week, WITHOUT the fluff. You'll also gain immediate access to my #socialmediamarketing resource library. Join now!

— Dhariana Lozano (@DhariLo) March 21, 2018

Take into consideration what formats work on each network for your audience as well. For example, I work with a client who’s Facebook Page audience reacts well to  links (and they wanted to keep their Facebook as a resource for links to content). So when we post a blog article on Facebook and we think it’s information we’d also like to share on Instagram we have to adjust. We pull key stats from the post and include them in our caption as a synopsis of the article we post on Facebook. It’s the same piece of content, we just tweak our delivery to match the network format and language.

4. Schedule According To Each Network’s Peak Time

The last piece of properly cross posting on social media is to schedule posts for their individual peak times on each social media network. This ensures you are posting when the most amount of people will see it per network.

I hope these steps will help you get a little more dynamic with your cross posting on social media. If you have any specific questions, please leave them below.

<3 DhariLo

P.S. I’ve opened up spaces for social media power hour with me! Check them out here.