The big three social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) all have features to link updates from one site to the others.

This can be a big time saver or a real problem, depending on how you do it and why.

If your audience/following for each site are the same, it can be a significant time savings. Just make sure the links are doing what you want. For example, if you post a link on Facebook and link that status update to Twitter, you’ll get a tweet with a link. But instead of leading to the site you linked to, the tweet will lead back to your Facebook page. Your follower must then click a second link. The more links we have to click, the less likely we are to click them.

But the bigger danger is in publishing content appropriate to your audience in on one site and inappropriate for your audience for the other.

I met with a client yesterday, and this issue came up. She’s a non-profit. She has a Facebook Cause page, a fan page, a LinkedIn account, a blog and a Twitter account. (Yes, that’s a lot of social media, and it makes sense for her.) Her non-profit is trying to attract multiple audiences, which is why she has so many accounts. The Cause page is for attracting donors. The fan page and blog are for people needing the services her organization provides. LinkedIn and Twitter are for attracting/finding policy makers in her area of specialization.

Her sites are aimed at different audiences. We talked about linking content among the different sites, and most of the time it didn’t make sense. Linking her blog to her Cause page would overload her donors with information they didn’t want or need. Same with promoting her blog through Twitter. Publishing the same content to the Cause page and fan page didn’t make sense either.

By the time we finished the session, she had a plan for what content was appropriate for each audience. We even came up with some ideas for blog topics that could be relevant to donors and her service community, and we developed a schedule for how often it made sense to cross-post.

Cross posting to different audiences can make sense. Her donors need to see their money is being used well. The people she is serving need to see she is actively raising money. But it can’t be done too often or her targeted messages will get lost.

Being on multiple social media sites can make sense. But before you cross-post content, make sure you’re aiming your content at the right audience.

Tags: blogging, communication, marketing, social media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 10:06 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.