This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
Scheduling and cross-pollinating on social networks
I did this to myself this week, and it’s happening more and more often, so here are more tales from the trenches of cross-posting.
Tale #1: Airing, not airing
On Monday I scheduled a few posts on Facebook and Twitter to talk about a pre-taped interview I did with a new podcast show, On the Record, on BlogTalkRadio and eWomenNetwork Radio. I was told the interview would air that afternoon. It turns out that it was another guest that day, and I figured I would be on the following week. I removed the posted tweet, Facebook & Google+ posts and the Facebook posts that I had scheduled, but forgot to delete the scheduled tweet on Hootsuite, so that was posted in the afternoon.
The host was gracious to clarify on Twitter that my interview would air next week.
Tale #2: The misspelled gram
Yesterday I noticed a Facebook post and image that was promotional in nature and meant to enroll people in a particular program. It was a beautiful image and obviously targeted to women. But, I noticed with my eagle eye that one key word in beautiful script text in the image was misspelled. And, it was posted from Instagram to Facebook so it went out as such on both networks. That’s a redo. (And, I let the person know about the misspelling.)
Tale #3: The boosted re-gram
A new business that launched last week has been really killing it on social media, primarily using Instagram to push to Facebook and Twitter. However I noticed yesterday that one of the Facebook posts was boosted to appear in my news feed. It was actually not a created post by the company, but a regram of a photo that someone else posted on their Instagram feed and tagged for the company to see. In their #regram, the company tagged the original poster, added a whole slew of hashtags, and pushed it to Facebook and Twitter. The problem with this is that when they boosted the post on Facebook, no text was changed. They didn’t care to re-tag the person (or company)’s Facebook page (if they had one), instead using @Instagramhandle and including all of the hashtags, looking exactly like it would on Instagram.
In my opinion, people don’t care for many hashtags on Facebook. Sure, maybe the one or two keywords, but no one’s searching for 25+. That boosted post could have included a lot more relevant information for the business AND given props to the original person (who might never know their content was used in a Facebook Sponsored post) instead of looking exactly the same as it did on Instagram.
On a lighter note, I learned yesterday about Buffer, which is similar to Hootsuite in its scheduling functions but also allows you to post the same content from one network to another. It’s a definite timesaver but I can see it getting confusing and you are really supposed to be thinking about the different audiences on each network anyway, so it’s not something I’m going to try immediately.
Do you have any trench stories to share, or tools that keep you sane among the different networks?