Shana Bull, Digital Marketing

View Original

The one reason you don’t want to have automatic posts for your social networks

I have all my posts from Instagram go directly to Twitter as native posts (vs links) through IFTTT. 99.9% of the time it’s OK. And then you get one that gets cut off..... 

 Yup. I tweeted the word pee. 

For the original post: http://instagram.com/sharayray

The second reason you don’t want to do this is because each individual social network has its own rules. With Instagram ( for some reason  ) you cannot create different paragraphs without some finagling. a.k.a. that dot in between each line.

On Twitter it just looks weird. And honestly if I was posting to Twitter again I would include a hashtag like #ThanksgivingPrep #WineNeeded, because that allows me to connect with more people on that platform. On Instagram I save my hashtags for the second line.

 If you use something like if this then that, there’s no guarantee that your content will be shared correctly from one social network to the other. 

And then there are the people that still share their content to Facebook or Instagramand have it automatically go to Twitter as a link.  It’s definitely a social media pet peeve of mine.

If I’m on Twitter I don’t want to go to Facebook or Instagram to see your content. I want to stay on Twitter, unless it’s a link to a blog post.  You’re making the user work to read your content and you always want to make it as easy as possible. 

 I’m a huge fan of using Buffer to create, and reuse content. Make it really, really easy to share something from Instagram and revamp it for Twitter and Facebook.  Definitely recommend checking it out

I hope you learn from my mistake and learn that you should use each individual social network on its own.   and by the way – this doesn’t mean post completely different content on all social networks. I am off for reusing content. The algorithms have changed when and where we see content. So even if you post the same picture with a little bit different copy the same people won’t see your content in all three mediums.