autoposting

4 Ways Cross-Posting is Harming Your Business

You created the perfect post. It’s catchy, the image is great, and the hashtags are perfect. Why should you limit yourself to only posting it on Facebook? You can very easily copy and paste it into Twitter, right? In fact, you should do that for every post to keep Twitter active. Right?

WRONG.

Social Media Cross-Posting is an epidemic in our area. Businesses that don’t devote the time and effort to create unique posts for their different platforms appear lazy and repetitive.

All your customers see is a business that claims to care about its customers but ignores half of its potential customers with repeat content. Your business is losing customers with this fruitless practice.

Are you guilty?

Are you guilty of posting the same content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Have you gotten so used to this practice that you’ve resorted to setting your profile to automatically publish your Facebook posts on Twitter?

Learn more about why Cross-posting is harming your business.

[bctt tweet=”Cross-posting on Facebook and Twitter is harming your business. Stop the epidemic of stale content. #smm #crosspost #facebook” username=”Techno_Goober”]

4 ways cross-posting harms your business

What is Cross-Posting?

Cross-Posting on social media is a practice of reposting exact content from one platform to another.

This can take many forms, but the most dangerous kind is the one built right in. In Facebook and Twitter, there are options to connect your profiles and automatically post updates from one to the other. This may seem to save you time, money, and effort, but ultimately it just looks sloppy.

There are also options for adding apps, widgets, or other extensions to cross-post blog posts and more to your feeds. These are just as bad and should be avoided at all costs.

Why Should You Avoid Cross-Posting?

I’ll give you 4 major reasons why you should avoid cross-posting on social media.

1. That Ugly Link to Keep Reading

Take this screenshot. The page was obviously posting pretty frequently, but their posts failed to engage or inform. 

twitter auto post

If you’re like us, then you paused and thought “Wait a second… Why do I have to go to Facebook to find out what this post is even about?”

If your user is on Twitter, it’s because they want to be on Twitter. Give them Twitter content ON Twitter. It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is, your followers won’t care unless they can SEE it.

2. Stale Content = Lower Engagement

On Facebook, it’s pretty common to see shared and reposted content. However, cross-posted content can become repetitive and annoying. Look next to the date on a Facebook post, and you can quickly tell if a post is original to Facebook or an Instagram copy-cat.

Instagram auto post

See that Instagram tag next to the date? That means this post was originally posted on Instagram before posting on Facebook. When a post is repeated on multiple platforms, it is called stale content. No one likes eating stale bread, just like no one likes seeing stale content. Stale content kills engagement. 

Your page will have lower and lower engagement every time you repost the same content. Your followers will see the same post over and over again until they unfollow your page or get stop engaging with anything. 

3. Content isn’t Platform Specific

Check out this post below. The image is bright and descriptive.

But, they don’t have any text in the post. It’s all hashtags. While hashtags are becoming more common on Facebook, they are almost exclusively used in conjunction with the text.

Facebook as a platform doesn’t have the function that Instagram or Twitter has to use hashtags like this. The original Instagram post was much more capable of handling the various hashtags.

It's Spring Time on Facebook

4. Your Customer Service Fails

Social Media for businesses isn’t just a way to post memes and baby pictures. It’s an excellent marketing opportunity, but most importantly it’s an extension of your Customer Service department.

That’s right. Social media is your digital customer service. It’s a way to contact customers and hear about their experience (good and bad) and make efforts to improve your service and your business.

If your business isn’t taking the time to create fresh content and engage users on your various social media platforms then your customer service is failing.

Cross-posting is the customer service equivalent of providing a disconnected 1-800 number for customers to call about their service. You could unintentionally alienate existing and potential customers.

The Easy Way to Fix the Problem

If your business is guilty of cross-posting, there is a really simple way to fix the problem. Custom tailor the content on your platforms.

Rather than cross-posting your content and risk the ugly links or too many hashtags on Facebook, just post the content yourself. It takes 1 minute longer to login into Twitter to post that video. It would take 1 minute to add some text and reduce the number of irrelevant hashtags on your Facebook post.

Get a Goober

If creating custom content seems like too much work, Techno Goober will do it for you. We specialize in social media marketing. We can act as your digital customer service agents to keep your profiles updated and filled with fresh content every month.

Call 302-645-7177 to visit us online to see how your business could benefit from professional social media management from Techno Goober. Breathe fresh air into your social media profiles this Spring with Techno Goober’s help.

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