Is less really more when it comes to social strategy? Abby Reilly of Wilderness says posting across channels won’t yield the results you’re expecting.
Cross-posting is something many brands are guilty of, and if you’re short of time, it can be an effective way to get content out to your audience, especially in a reactive capacity. But don’t let it be the backbone of your social media strategy.
What is cross-posting?
Cross-posting is the process of posting the same content across multiple social media channels or accounts. This could be taking a 16×9 video originally posted on and created for YouTube and uploading the same file to Instagram without amends.
Why does it matter?
Each platform is unique in its formats, audiences, and content preferences; and your social media content should be, too. Ensuring content is optimized for each platform is essential to an organic strategy and maximizing algorithms.
In fact, platforms are even making conscious decisions around ensuring content is unique. For example, Meta platforms heavily restrict content that features a competitor’s logo, such as YouTube.
This alters creators’ ability to cross-post, particularly publishing Facebook-created content to Instagram Reels, with algorithms even prioritizing content that is created with platform-specific software.
So, what’s the alternative?
Audiences are more likely to engage with content that resonates with them and their interests and habits. Your audience is likely to differ from platform to platform, especially in terms of age. Making bespoke, age-demographic-specific content is a great way to build credibility and sentiment among followers.
Taking the time to create unique or repurposed platform-specific content increases reach, engagement and audience sentiment. As we move into an era of humanization and rebellion, here are five tips for a killer social strategy.
1. Know your demographic
Knowing exactly who is seeing your content helps tailor your creative to them. Is your Instagram demographic younger than your Facebook demographic? If so, make sure you show this in your content types, themes, and executions.
Ensuring content resonates with your audience is the first failproof step in a strong and effective social media strategy. Reporting tools and social media audits are essential in understanding this, alongside insights from companies like GWI.
2. Keep up to date
Trends and algorithms are constantly shifting and changing, so keeping up to date on what works is a great practice to ensure your content stays relevant to your platforms and audience.
Websites like Social Media Today are a great choice to subscribe to in order to receive the latest news on what’s new in the world of social media. Attending industry events and webinars is another great way to refresh your knowledge to aid your strategy.
3. Understand how to interpret your results
Producing quality content needs to be supported by strategic rationale and decisions in order to understand what is working—and why. Analyzing your results, insights, impressions and engagements, can help paint a picture of exactly what is working on your account and what is not.
Insights also support strategic content testing and audience testing, helping you to produce content that specifically resonates with your audience. Social listening and dashboards also assist in understanding and tracking brand sentiment from your content and wider customer experiences. Without results and insights, you’d be missing the middle of the jigsaw puzzle.
4. Bring brand value
With brands on social media aspiring to be the next Ryanair or Duolingo due to their enviable viral content, it’s important to remember your core brand values and tone of voice. Quirky, humorous content doesn’t work for every brand or every audience. It’s all about how you identify what is trending and make it ownable to your brand and resonate with your audience.
Ensuring brand value is front-of-mind for creative on social media is key to producing good content. Don’t be afraid to take risks or try something new, but consider how impactful it is when aligned with your social media business objectives and wider strategic plan. Oh and, if you can help it, don’t cross-post.
This article was written by Abby Reilly from The Drum and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.
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