I just learned that in a few days, you will be able to feed your Facebook profile updates to Twitter. You may already be feeding all of your Facebook page updates to Twitter. Or you may be feeding all of your Tweets to Facebook. You may also be feeding all of your Twitter updateds to LinkedIn. You’re probably feeding all of your blog articles to Twitter. You might be using Ping.FM to feed everything to everywhere.
And that is why you are failing: you can’t simplify communication.
Social media is not an assembly line that will allow you to turn large profits if you can just find the correct order to make the process take the least time and effort. If your idea of “doing social media” is to create a system that allows you to click one button every day and push your message everywhere on the interwebz, than keep Pinging your Tweets to YouFace. And I’ll be over here, ignoring you. Tim Walker said it best on Twitter: it comes down to being efficient versus effective.
Your contacts on LinkedIn don’t want to see the pictures from that party that you shared on Facebook. Your Facebook friends don’t want to see your 50+ daily Tweets equipped with @replies and #hashtags. (See: Jason Falls’ post today) A message that works on one network will almost never carry over well to another. The networks themselves are not the same, and people certainly do not use them the same.
I understand why you want to simplify the process. Time is a scarce and precious resource. But creating a web that feeds everything from every network to every other network is not an effective allocation of your resources. And it’s not going to work.
That being said, I have used Ping.fm, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc. to post an update to more than one social network simultaneously. BUT I only do this when the message translates seemlessly across all networks, would not be better if altered or shared in a different way, and is something I want to share with everyone to whom I am connected. I do this with about 5 posts in a given week. I Tweet an average of 32 times per day, so in a week I cross-post about 2% of my Tweets to Facebook, and less than 1% to LinkedIn.
After I published this post, I used HootSuite to post to all 3 networks that I had updated my blog. But I tweaked the copy for each network to make it relevant to the different audiences. Effective AND efficient.
But hey, that’s just me. What’s your take? What do you do to be effective and efficient?
Keenan says:
Social Media is about giving, and adding value to your followers and friends. Looking for ways to streamline and simplify is making it about you. Error to much on the side of you, you won’t have any followers or friends.
Dec 15, 2009, 3:55 pmElijah Young says:
While I generally agree that mass-posting everything to every site isn’t the answer. There is a benefit to linking and unifying your message across several different platforms, and driving them to a destination through that link/funnel.
The content on each platform should be unique to that audience, but there should be a common thread, more than just you, if that make sense.
Elijah
Dec 15, 2009, 7:45 pmSeth Lilly says:
Good points, Cheryl. Different mediums require different versions of the message.
Dec 15, 2009, 3:30 pmJim Brochowski says:
Have to admit I am very guilty of being behind the learning curve on this, and I still cross post without tweaking more than I probably should.
I know Chris Brogan has never advocated cross posting, but my reasoning had always been that as long as I posted with “all” audiences in mind and monitored “all” outposts it was all good.
Now I think I was wrong, albeit maybe not “all” wrong.
Stll there were a few eye openers for me on this one.
I “tweeted” a workshop and got a lot of negative feedback from the Facebook crowd, but mostly they just wanted to know why I kept putting RT and @ in my posts, and why I had so many updates that day.
A few months ago I switched my cross posting tool from Twitter to FB to “Selective Twitter Status,” and my Twitter conversations started to really slow down. I think the #fb tacked onto my posts turned people off.
Finally, When LinkedIn added a similar hashtag it stuck in my brain that there would be no way I would want to post to LinkedIn what I had posted on Twitter or Facebook.
So I started to really look at things and be even more careful about what I cross posted.
When I started using Hoot Suite I found a tool that allowed me to be a lot more selective, use a lot less RT’s and @’s as it were and still be a central place to make it easy for me to reach out. I still use the same philosophy of keeping all audiences in mind when I post something, and I probably still don’t tweak as much as I should, but I’m a lot more selective about what gets pushed across the board, and I still monitor every outpost so that I’m in the conversations and not just talking at people.
Great post Cheryl. Real food for thought about the “right way,” to share our messages.
Dec 15, 2009, 10:17 pmCheryl says:
Thanks for the great comment, Jim! And you make a great point - even if you are being very careful about what you cross-post and know the message and the format makes sense for all outposts, you HAVE to monitor them all. I’ve commented on Facebook statuses that were merely Twitter feeds and never received a response (to response-seeking comments) because the person feeding content was ignoring that community, and likely had forgotten it existed.
Dec 15, 2009, 1:45 pmNate Riggs says:
I agree that each different outpost has a unique context and your messages should be tailored to fit each different network. But I think it’s important to reiterate the fact that time is valuable and tools like Hootsuite and Ping FM are still useful - even in monitoring replys to any message. A lot of times, it’s using those tools that que me to go back to the actual network and communicate their.
I guess it depends on how you intend to use your networks. If you’re simply socializing and have the time during your day to monitor multiple tabs, then more power to you. But if you’re working and time is short, and you still want to participate in what’s going on across your networks, you need to find a way to simplify your own communication process. Be careful in cross posting, but don’t fully abandon it. Social media is fun, and it’s easy to get sucked in. Be careful that you don’t spend your whole day playing around in your outposts. You may find yourself with a great big stack of unfinished work on your desk.
Dec 15, 2009, 2:08 pmCheryl says:
Nate - I’m not talking about people who are “socializing,” I’m talking about those using social media for business purposes. And I am in no way arguing against cross posting selectively - as I now have 8 different accounts (profiles, pages, etc) that I can update simultaneously via HootSuite, and update more than one when it counts.
Even when time is short and you have the same message you need to share in different places, it’s important to take an extra 15 secondsto think about how it’s coming across to your community. For example, if I wanted Twitter AND Facebook to know I was having a conversation with you about XYZ, I couldn’t post the message the same way, because on Twitter it would be @NateRiggs and on Facebook I would have to be ON Facebook to TAG @Nate Riggs.
And yes - it can be a huge time suck. Always a good caution
Dec 15, 2009, 3:44 pmRaygen says:
Very good points Cheryl
I personally don’t use social media or social networks. I don;t just due to the simple facts that the privacy polices of using such services are unacceptable. I know most users never read those policies, but if one does, they would would be shocked to see the verbage in those policies…its something I will never agree with.
However, I can agree that the use of social media in certain niches can be a very nice way to get your message out there to a targeted audience. I also agree with the one size does not fit all message your conveying here. Afterall, each social network targets a different base of users, and Twitter is more of a micro-blogging service then the traditional social network like Facebook is.
great post Cheryl, keep it up!
Hello from Ohio by the way, i have about had it with snow allready and its only January…hope you had a great New Year! Take care!
Dec 15, 2009, 5:27 am