Most business owners with a modicum of digital savviness are well-aware of how important it is to consistently be posting on social media, but did you know that itโs just as important to be consistently posting new content to your website, too? Itโs true!
With social media, the benefits are fairly obvious: these platforms are by definition social, which means you need to be putting yourself out there for people to see and posting regular content for people to comment on, share, and otherwise engage with. With websites that benefit isnโt necessarily as simple to grasp, but itโs no less true.ย
Posting regular blogs, articles, and case studies benefits your website by powering up your SEO rankings, drawing in a wider audience, and giving your existing customers all the more reason to come backโand spend more money. So rather than letting your web presence languish by resting on your laurels, keep on posting so your business stays relevant and attractive.
Pro: Cross-posting videos means less work on creative
Clearly, the biggest โproโ of multiplatform videos is that you only have to make one video for various platforms, rather than a unique video for each one. Whether youโre handling the creative work yourself or paying to outsource it to an agency or marketing company, only needing one video rather than several means time and money saved, no matter which way you slice it.
And itโs not just the time and money saved on the actual creation of the video that you need to factor, but the ideation process too: It can take exponentially less time to brainstorm one good idea than to sit around toying with how different ideas will suite each different platform, how they function similarly vs where they differ, what different tools or settings you may need, etc. Thereโs no way around it; cross-posting content just means money saved.
Con: Posting the same videos means your audience sees the same content
However much money you may be saving on the front end by only creating one piece of video content, you also need to factor in how these videos will play out on your back-end in terms of their end goal: actually marketing your business. People are rarely social media purists; most of us use multipleโand often severalโsocial media platforms daily, for a variety of intentions and purposes.
This means that if your audience is following you on all your social platforms and youโre doing nothing but cross-posting the same video, that audience is going to start feeling content fatigue very quickly. If they know theyโll see the same exact video whether they pull you up on Instagram or TikTok, they may even start to wonder why theyโre following you on these various platforms at all. Multiplatform video posting may save you money up front, but you need to pay close attention to whether or not itโs doing you harm at the end of the day.
Pro: Cross-posted content lets you compare apples to apples
When it comes to social media marketing, metrics are king. And as any good data-head knows, the cleaner the data, the better your analysis. Treating social media engagement and performance like a scientist will give you the best possible information to make informed decisions, but it also means thinking like a scientist as much as possible.
Multiplatform videos help this scientific process by isolating a major variable: the content itself. When you cross-post the exact same video on both Facebook and Twitter, it gives you the opportunity to see precisely how those different audiences respond to your content, without having to worry about whether or not content tweaked uniquely for each platform is swaying those results. And this super-clean data can help you make useful decisions about where to focus your time, money, and marketing efforts.
Con: Multi-platform videos donโt maximize each platformsโ potential
While a true apples-to-apples performance comparison is an enticing (and genuinely useful!) prospect for your video marketing, it can come at the expense of ultimate performance on any given platform. Even when the functionality is broadly similar (eg: the short-form video content of TikTok and Instagram Reels), different platforms will have different audiences and different algorithms which means that the same content wonโt necessarily resonate in the same way.ย
Users will respond best to content made specifically to appeal to that platform, and this goes double for sites that donโt have that similar functionality (for example, on a primarily text-based platform like Twitter, your most effective content may not even be video at all!). And some platforms are even starting to wise up to lazy cross-posting effortsโInstagram started deprioritizing reels that contained TikTokโs watermark; a common side-effect of posting a video on TikTok, downloading it, then re-sharing to Instagram.ย
To cross-post or not to cross-post? Ask the experts!
Questions like โdoes it make sense to post multiplatform videosโ can be difficult to answer! The best route isnโt always immediately clear and may require expending time and effort analyzing data to determine. And of course, it changes on a case-by-case basisโsome videos make perfect sense to cross-post, and others may not.ย
If your head is spinning, or if youโd rather leave this sort of social media decision-making up to the experts, we hope youโll consider reaching out to Skol Marketingโs Minnesota-based team. To learn more about how we can help you craft original content and an effective social media strategy, please donโt hesitate to contact the social media marketing experts at Skol Marketing.
