Five easy ways to cross promote your social media content

If you’re using multiple social media platforms to promote your business, it makes sense to cross promote the media you generate through the various channels available, and try to play to the inherent strengths of each of the platforms.

Doing this increases your content’s exposure to a larger audience, which means you have more people engaging with your brand.

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For example, if you’ve already built up a healthy fan base on Facebook, but have only just started  to engage on Twitter or YouTube, you can promote this new content to your Facebook audience that is already established and more open to engaging with your brand.

As well as exposing your content to more people, you’ll also increase the chances that those people share your content with their own circle of influence, which broadens its exposure even more.

Integrating your content across platforms is simpler than it seems thanks to tools built into most major social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, and blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger.

Here are five ways to begin cross-promoting among them:

1. Pull your Twitter feed into your Facebook Page
   If you have a Facebook Page, the Facebook Twitter app lets you pull through your Twitter updates into a separate Twitter tab on your page. By integrating the two, you allow your Facebook fans to see your Twitter updates, which increases the likelihood that they’ll follow you on Twitter (assuming they are already Twitter users). Pulling your Twitter feed through to Facebook is also a good way of ensuring your Page has regular fresh content uploaded to it, which is a key factor in the success of your page.

   How to do it: You need to already have a Twitter profile and a Facebook Page set up in order to integrate the two. Once you have both set up, log into your Facebook account linked to your Page, and install the Twitter app.

2. Pull blog updates into your Facebook Page
   In the same way you can pull through your Twitter feed into your Facebook Page, you can also pull through blog posts you’ve published on external platforms like Blogger or WordPress. Just as with pulling in Twitter updates (see point 1), pulling in your blog posts gives your writing more exposure to a larger audience, and again helps you to keep adding a steady stream of fresh, useful content to your Facebook Page on a regular basis.

   How to do it: The app to pull through blog posts is preloaded on your Facebook Page, so log into Facebook and then click “Edit” under the Notes Icon. On the notes page, click “Import a Blog” on the right side of the page. Enter your blog’s website or RSS address, which will then pull through your blog posts into your Notes tab each time you publish them.

3. Post your Blog updates on Twitter
   Tweeting the title of your blog post along with a link to your post is a simple way of exposing your blog to a wider audience. However, you should exercise moderation when you do this; in other words, your Twitter feed shouldn’t just be made up of links to blog posts you’ve written. This is because a Twitter account is most effective (and you’ll get more followers) if you use it to engage with other Twitter users and post genuinely useful external resources, rather than just using it to punt your business.

   How to do it: Most major blogging platforms such as WordPress contain plug-ins that will automatically tweet your blog posts once published. However, for the reasons mentioned above, it’s often a good idea to do this manually, so that you’re only tweeting a selection of your best content that you feel are worth tweeting about. Tweeting your blog posts manually is also a good way of getting yourself to write a catchy blog post title that encourages people to click through to your post from your tweet.

4. Promote your Facebook Page on your blog and website
   Besides using Facebook Advertising to advertise your page within Facebook, you should also promote it wherever you can externally, such as on your blog or website. Facebook provides you with a “Find us on Facebook” image that you can link to your specific Facebook page URL. In this way, people reading your resources or browsing products and services on your website are given an additional avenue via which to give feedback, ask questions, or access content.

   How to do it: Once you’ve set up your Page, install the Facebook Page Badge.

5. Place share buttons on your blog
   Probably the simplest way of encouraging the content on your blog or website to be shared is to include “Share” buttons below an article or post. With these buttons, the reader can share your content across the social media channels that they choose, for example they can retweet your article, share it on Facebook, or bookmark it to their Digg or Delicious account.

   How to do it: Although there are many ways to do this, one way is to generate a share button using the AddThis service. The site generates a button depending on your specific content platform (e.g. WordPress, Blogger or your own website), and you can choose its look and feel to suite your website or blog’s style. If you register with the site, you can also access statistics about who has shared specific content on a particular sharing site.