Pros and Cons of Cross Posting

If your restaurant has several social network accounts, you probably spend a good amount of time each day curating content to post, and you may have heard of using a method called “cross posting” to keep your social network accounts active. Cross posting consists of posting the same content, updates, statuses, or interactions across multiple social network platforms, and can be a valuable tool for restaurant owners.  But the technique has some negatives as well.  Here are the biggest pros and cons of cross posting.

Pros of Cross Posting

Posting the same content on multiple social networks has some definite benefits.  First, you can keep all of your social networks “active” more easily, and be sure that all of your accounts appear “alive” to fans and followers.  When social network users see that accounts haven’t posted in a while, they are likely to stop paying attention to users that are perceived as “dead” or inactive.  Posting regular updates to all of your accounts, will make sure they stay “alive” in viewers eyes.

Additionally, cross posting the same content on multiple social network platforms will save you a lot of time.  As a restaurant owner and busy professional, you can’t always spend a lot of time every day developing new content or finding food things to post.  And posting the same material in multiple places will cut down a lot on the time you spend online looking for things to share and creating new content.

Cons of Cross Posting

Despite some of the big “pros” of cross posting, the technique does have some drawbacks.  One of the biggest is that different social networks are optimized for different kinds of content.  An update that will draw lots of attention on twitter won’t get the same kind of feedback or gain the same amount of traction on Facebook, and more specialized networks like Instagram and Pinterest won’t even have the same kinds of content as your twitter feed.  Posting the same things to multiple networks means that you aren’t using each unique network to its fullest potential.

Plus, by posting duplicate content on different platforms, your dedicated fans that follow you on multiple social networks may feel cheated or not be as invested in your content.  If you post different things on each network, you will gain the advantage of giving your most dedicated fans different content to interact with, and you will see your post engagement benefit!

Please share your thoughts in the comments!