Cross-Posting to Social Media This issue continues a series of newsletters devoted to social media. Social media have been expanding exponentially on the Web for the last few years, and their popularity is an obvious reason to include them in your web promotion campaigns.

We’ve already written about how to choose the best social channel for your promotion campaigns, and this time we‘ll give a few tips on cross-posting to social media.

Social media marketers consider cross-posting a great time- and effort-saving practice, but on the other hand, cross-posts, if not done properly, will come across as an annoying spam technique. If you realize your aim, cross-posting can be taken advantage of without undesirable consequences.

The first and more impersonal form of cross-posting is used for link popularity building. Specifically, you post the same article to many sources (mainly blogs) with links to your ‘main’ website, thus obtaining links for Google PageRank escalation. However, the SEO effect from this can be so insufficient that it is simply not worth your effort. Links from non-authoritative sites (as your clone pages with cross-posted content) are useless, because:

* Their value is doubtful because new pages are not linked from important external pages and have zero or very little PageRank;

* You can’t expect good traffic because the third-party blogs include your full-text article and there is no need for the readers to visit your website,

* A huge amount of page duplicates may prevent your website from emerging in SERPs – search engines filter clones out, and authoritative blogs may be trusted more and thus ranked higher than your site.

Some experts recommend that in order to keep the content unique, you should post your articles to blogs with a 2 or 3-day delay after it had been posted at your primary website. Besides, the articles should include a link to your site, and your site version of the article should have a paragraph or two more.

Obviously, this technique is purely SEO-oriented, and you will hardly get new readers this way. So, what’s the point to cross-posting?

There is another way to cross-post your content that is traffic or visitor-oriented. To attract readers to your articles, create a visitor-friendly blog (for example, on the Wordpress platform), and fill it with unique and helpful content. Create accounts in popular social networks and communities, whose members may be interested in your experience and conclusions. BUT, you should not publish your full-text articles in such media, since the aim is to promote your blog and forward traffic there. Write short announcements instead, and link them to your blog. This way people will come to your website, read the articles, and leave comments.

Popular blog host platforms often allow you to create communities on the basis of mutual interests, so your blog topic can have a perfectly targeted audience. Posting announcements to communities and actively taking part in discussions will be rewarded with good traffic.

As for the technical part, there is no best way to post. Social media have specific integration options, which make webmasters and marketers work to find the shortest ways to submit an article to the largest number of their social accounts. Here are a few pages describing the most rational ways to cross-post.

http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php/component/content/article/13-citizen-journalism/1037765

http://www.web2whizzing.com/how-to-cross-post/

http://www.boldinteractive.com/how-to-cross-post-wordpress-to-a-facebook-fan-page/

http://mashable.com/2010/02/15/google-buzz-wordpress/

A final tip: if you start cross-posting content in your status posts or blog posts on a few social media sites, be careful to leave nothing to chance, otherwise nasty things may happen (this is a real story by a cross-poster). Feel responsibility to your readers and don’t waste their time (such as by repeating the same cross-post over and over again), because they are not only reading and commenting on your posts, they participate in shaping your reputation.

Cross-posting will help you promote your business only if you take time to do it properly.