Cross Posting Content to Multiple Social Platforms

Cross posting is using an application to post to multiple social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and or Linkedin for example, all at once.

There are reasons why you may be doing this already. There are also reasons not to.

Here are my personal reflections on cross posting: ultimately it's what works for you.

Cross posting is:

• Using a stand-alone tool to compose posts, assign, possibly schedule and publish them to selected or multiple social channels at once. 

While that sounds like a great idea for (you) the publisher, cross posting does not, isn't intended to, serve your audience: it serves you. It's a time saver. An easy to get more done: but in getting your message out en masse have you best served your audience?

Consider your audience when cross-posting.
If you don't it can make you look lazy, anti-social, and possibly harm the relationship you are trying to build. Here are a few examples ...

Same platform posting.

Using a third party application you can send the same content of to multiple Pages at the same time. But you should keep in mind that anyone following multiple Pages will be served the same content side-by-side in their stream. Duplication of content is likely to lead to people to unfollowing one or more Pages to prevent the duplication.  The video example below shows a search which highlights an extreme case of the same content fired off to multiple Google+ Pages.

The Page admin is saving (their) time, but with no benefit to, and a questionable impact on their audience.

Multi-Platform posting. 

People sometimes post at the same time to different platforms. This again saves time, but is in my opinion a mistake, as each platform has it's own quirks and content is best crafted with these in mind.

The obvious example is pushing to twitter and elsewhere. You write copy with twitter's limited character support in mind, which takes no advantage of the other platforms greater character space or formatting options.

Examples:
Aol tweet ....

... and Google+ post.

That's quite a common scenario. Twitter is the established network for the user, so they tag-on pushing to Google+. There are many examples which generally express themselves in the form of: Short-snappy-text +  + .

If you're doing this then you're just ticking the box. Different platforms require posts to be "crafted" accordingly. Google+ for example is a platform where long-form content works very well. You have lots of space to craft your copy.

The layered screen-shots from twitter and Google+ here show The Seattle Times also "@mentioning" specifically for twitter, which is useless when pushed to Google+.

A relatively small number of professional users make these kinds of errors when posting for Pages. Thankfully it doesn't take much effort to avoid what are simple mistakes.

There are other common errors but I'll save those for a different post. Unless you want to guess?

Do use a third party application to broadcast post to multiple channels at once?