Cross promotion 101
What you’ll learn
- Evergreen long-form content is easy to cross promote
- Cross promotion helps fill out and unify your content strategy
- Curate your promotional content to the platform you’re posting it to
- Use creator tools to ensure your content looks great when shared by fans
What is cross promotion?
Cross promotion is how you share the same content across multiple platforms and drive content traffic. Essentially, it’s creating content about your content and tailoring it to the strengths of your platforms. A well crafted cross promotion plan avoids posting the same thing at the same time on multiple channels. Instead, it highlights and teases your content in unique and interesting ways that engage your audience.
Identify promotable content
Cross promotion is about generating interest and directing traffic to your content. So knowing what type of content, and where you want to direct your fans, is important to identify. Choose content that brings value, such as a how-to tutorial, or engages your followers, like a live Q&A. Evergreen long-form content is a great place to start. Robust content with assets, like a blog post, can easily be broken into smaller content pieces, such as a series of tweets. Use these small content pieces as teasers to entice readers to dive deeper!
Learn more about evergreen content and how to generate more traffic with it from Keiko Lynn in this episode of Creator Insights.
Work promotional posts into your content strategy
Your content strategy outlines how you plan, create, and deliver your content. Using cross promotion to inform and direct followers to your content should be an integral part of your strategy. This helps create unity between different channels and strengthens your brand. Additionally, it allows you to repurpose and extend the life of existing content so that you don’t need to come up with new ideas and assets for every post.
Design unique posts for each platform
Cross promotion is different from cross posting. Cross promotion highlights a single piece of content across multiple platforms, but does so in a way that's unique to each individual channel. Cross posting simply takes the same promotional content and uses it on all channels.
For example, if you wrote a blog post about the top 10 must visit restaurants in Waikiki Beach, you could post a video on TikTok of the dishes you ate at the 10th restaurant on the list. This type of content might also work great as an Instagram Reel! While it might be tempting to simply export the TikTok and post it to Instagram, you risk alienating platform-specific followers. Fans who are used to engaging with you on Instagram might be turned off by the burned in TikTok logo, or think it was posted by mistake. Or, they may think you’re trying to direct them to your TikTok instead of your blog.
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Take the time to learn what types of posts work best on various platforms. Most have guidance or a creator portal to help you get started!
Check for appearances
When posting a link to your content on social channels, ensure it has the proper information for the preview to appear correctly. The following platforms provide tools that preview how your content will look when a URL is shared:
- Twitter: twitter card validator
- Facebook: Facebook sharing debugger
- Pinterest: Pinterest Rich Pins Validator
