What Is Cross-Posting? How To Cross-Post Content (2024)

With many social media platforms available and new ones emerging, vying for attention online can be daunting. The goal of a social media marketing strategy is to boost brand awareness and drive users to your website, but how do you gain attention without burning out?

Once you create quality content for your brand, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel for every social media channel. Cross-posting strategic, streamlined content will help you reach different target audiences, meet your followers on their preferred platforms, and maintain consistent messaging. 

Here’s how to use social media content across your channels without doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your workload.

What is cross-posting?

Cross-posting is the practice of posting duplicate or similar content across multiple social media platforms. Instead of spending time creating a post for only one platform, cross-posting across social channels is a practical way to reach a wider audience with the same message. Cross-post text, images, videos, and polls by manually copying content into each platform or by utilizing a cross-posting tool. 

The primary benefit of cross-posting is that it saves time while growing your social media presence. Creating unique content for multiple social media platforms can be time-consuming. By cross-posting, a social media manager can focus on strategy and analytics rather than planning individual posts.

In addition to saving time and getting your content in front of a wider audience, cross-posting creates continuity across channels. Small teams, brands with a limited marketing budget, or brands with limited content can benefit from a cross-posting strategy.

How to effectively cross-post for your ecommerce business

Leverage the strengths of each platform audience to increase impressions and engagement. Here’s how to add cross-posting to your social media strategy: 

Create content that is relevant across channels

If you are pursuing a cross-posting strategy for your ecommerce business, design social media marketing content that is—at its core—appropriate for multiple platforms. If you are already posting on social media for your brand, you are likely already creating content that will resonate with audiences. Think about what your target audience values most so you can focus on creating content that serves them—no matter the platform. 

For example, a quick video demonstrating how to use your product could be appropriate across the board for TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Invest the time and effort in making this video once, then reap the rewards from the cross-posted content. 

By contrast, a lighthearted video of your employees doing a TikTok dance challenge might not be appropriate to cross-post to LinkedIn. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t participate in TikTok trends; simply center the bulk of your strategy around lasting messages over fleeting fads. 

Tweak the details 

Cross-posting exists on a spectrum. You can post duplicate content word for word across all your channels or customize the text of a video to suit each platform’s core audience. Either way, you can promote your content without starting from scratch. When making tweaks for cross-posting, consider social media content best practices, such as character count limits and image size guidelines. 

Consider the varied requirements across different platforms when planning your cross-posted content:

• Audience. Learn the demographics and interests of your audiences on various channels to tailor your posts to meet their expectations.
• Messaging. The voice and tone of your messaging may need to change depending on the social media platform. You’ll likely aim to craft more professional, authoritative content for LinkedIn than for Facebook. 
• Character limits. Consider character limits that might restrict your use of text, such as the 280-character limit on X for free accounts. 
• Aspect ratios. Prioritize the correct visuals for each platform, such as aspect ratios or video length limits. 
• Clickable links. To drive clickable links on each platform, adjust your call to action or approach. For example, clickable links aren’t available in Instagram posts in the way they are on X posts. But you can use a clickable link in Instagram Stories to drive traffic to your website. 
• Hashtags. Even if hashtags are available and users apply them in the same way across channels, refining hashtags on different social media platforms is a quick way to tailor your posts to the audience on that account. 

Use a cross-posting tool

When cross-posting, save time by using a social media management tool to schedule posts. Scheduling tools can help you publish your posts at the optimal time for each platform, in order to reach each audience when they are active. This can also help avoid over-saturation in case users are following your brand on multiple channels. 

Social media scheduling tools—like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Social Pilot—make it easy to schedule your posts in advance. This is extra helpful if you are targeting users in various time zones. They also allow you to share content across many channels with only a few clicks. 

Learn the best times to post on each of these social channel:

Monitor the results

A benefit of cross-posting is that you can quickly and easily increase the volume of your content on more social platforms. Maybe you’ve always been dedicated to your Instagram account and followers there, but you’d like to target new followers or different audiences on Facebook. Cross-posting can help you establish an initial social media presence, although it might not help you achieve maximum engagement. 

While establishing your presence on a specific platform, dive into social media analytics. Utilizing social media analytics tools while cross-posting will help you pinpoint any cross-posted content that flopped on a specific platform. Use these advanced analytics to gain insights on when cross-posting is worthwhile versus when it would be best to invest the time crafting a new post. Social media optimization will be unique to your brand and audiences.

Common cross-posting mistakes to avoid

Cross-posting has benefits, but it also has drawbacks. Avoid these mistakes when deciding to utilize a cross-posting strategy:

Expecting the same performance across channels

With so many social media platforms, there are varied content requirements and trends in what will perform well or poorly. Each social channel has different characteristics, so it’s best to tweak your content for each platform, when possible. This can help you maximize your cross-posting strategy. 

If you have a goal of expanding your reach on a specific social media platform, you’re best off creating a specific strategy and posts optimized for that channel. Focus on the specific target audience and tailor the features of the posts to the characteristics of that platform. 

Cross-posting specialized announcements 

When sharing important announcements or specialized information, take the time to craft a post strategically for each relevant channel. Important messages can get lost in social algorithms if you haven’t optimized the post to perform well, so it’s worthwhile to thoughtfully craft your messaging so that even loyal followers won’t miss an update.

Cross-posting identical content across all channels

If loyal customers follow your brand across multiple social media channels, repetitive content may bore them. This could cause them to ignore your content, unfollow your account, or lose respect for your brand—outcomes that aren’t worth the time savings from cross-posting. 

Cross-posting is a practical way to publish your content on social platforms, and all brands use cross-posting to some extent. But don’t get complacent by posting the exact same thing on all your accounts, even though it can be tempting to postidentical content across your social media accounts with just a few clicks.