5 Tips for Successfully Cross-Promoting Your Social Media Profiles

If your business has multiple active social media platforms (and this should hopefully be the case), you may have given some thought as to how to create a more integrated social media marketing strategy. If you haven’t, then it’s high time you did. “Integrated” doesn’t mean posting the same thing at the same time on all your social media channels, however. Your Twitter audience can be vastly different from the type of people you interact with on Facebook, and your Instagram followers may respond entirely different to certain types of posts than your Pinterest fans.

Each social media platform affords unique opportunities for engagement, but you must give careful attention to delivering a consistent brand message across all of your social media profiles. Here’s how to effectively cross-promote your social media profiles, so your content engages as many people as possible.

1. Remember that cross-promotion does not mean cross-posting. Many businesses use social media management systems such as HootSuite or Buffer to publish a piece of content on all of their social media platforms simultaneously, but blasting the same post across multiple channels doesn’t take into account the specifics of each social media platform.

Posts that are repeated ad nauseam across all of your social profiles can come across as insincere, or even worse, just plain lazy. For example, have you ever seen a status update on Facebook that said “Please favorite and retweet”? What about those tweets that read “I posted a new photo to Facebook,” followed by a link?

While cross-posting does make the process of social media management quicker and more convenient, you run the risk of losing credibility, which is far more important. Take the extra time to cater to the fans and followers of each specific platform by tailoring your message in a way that will make sense to each particular audience.

2. Include links to your other social network profiles in whatever profile you’re currently signed into. For example, YouTube allows you to post links to your other social network profiles on your Channel page, and they will even furnish the social icons to go with them. You can do the same thing with your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram accounts.

3. It’s no secret that images rule the day when it comes to social posting, but be mindful that not all image formats are the same. For example, a large picture posted on Facebook may be cropped when you try to post it on Twitter. While this is not a huge problem, many people won’t make the extra effort to click on the cropped image in their Twitter timeline just to see the whole thing. It would be better to resize the image to fit Twitter’s slightly narrower format. If you’re posting images on Pinterest that you plan to cross-promote elsewhere, keep in mind that Pinterest has a vertically-oriented format, so it’s better to adjust the picture accordingly. While these nuances will require some extra effort, it is worth it in terms of publishing quality content that will better serve your audience.

4. If you’re going to post a link to a particular piece of content from your website on various social channels, create customized tracking URLs so you know where clicks are coming from. This will help you identify which social networks offer the most engagement for your business, and it will also give you a way to pinpoint areas of low interaction, so that you can “beef up” your presence on those less active networks.

5. If you’re putting on a special event specific to one particular social network (like a Twitter Q&A), make sure you promote it on other networks where you’ve established a presence. While most people have a “favorite” social network that they frequent, there are thousands of people who participate in more than one social network on a regular basis. Just be sure to promote the event on other social networks in a manner that makes the most sense in terms of their respective formats. For example, you could promote your Twitter Q&A on Instagram using an image that provides all the details of the event (date, time, topic, etc.) in a visually appealing way.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to social media cross-promotion is that you want to emphasize quality over everything else. Definitely deliver a consistent message, but take the time and make the extra effort to promote your content in a manner that’s compatible with the format and audience of each social media site – doing this creates a more genuine user experience on your social media pages.