A client wrote to us and asked “How do I post the same update on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, automatically, every time I put a new blog post up? I really want to save time!”

This prompted a flurry of advice from our side on whether this is really something you want to be doing.
If you want to post on the different platforms in one step, you could use Social Media Dashboard apps and tools like Hootsuite or Market Me Suite which allow you to post the same things on all the different social platform.

Our friend, Marketing Mentor Tamsin Fox Davies, is a fan of using Dashboards too and she says: “Dashboards are great tools, but are best used in combination with direct posts for actual updates. For example, use a dashboard for monitoring, finding people to follow, keeping track of your mentions and items to repost/retweet. You can also use other autopost tools like the “Tweet Old Post plugin for WordPress, to keep old blog posts visible, and the simple share tool in Constant Contact, to announce publishing your email newsletters.”

But Tamsin and I both agree that autoposting everything to all the social networks is not something we recommend, and her is why:

5 reasons why you should think twice before autoposting the same message on different social media platforms

1. Each platform is different When you post on Facebook you get more than 140 characters, and you can upload images and video files, or choose thumbnails to go with each post update. By having the post come from a 3rd party application you miss out on making your Facebook posts look visual and enticing – so I would always recommend manually posting on Facebok so your content looks how you want it to.
2. And it could have the opposite effect: Facebook uses an algorithm called Edgerank to decide if posts get higher priority based on the amount of likes/shares/comments the user gets. Autoposted updates (from 3rd party applications like Hootsuite) have been shown to receive less of this interactivity because Facebook doesn’t give these as much prominence within the Edgerank. So your posts will not be seen as much if you use third party applications.
3. Twitter has its own language and style: When you update Twitter, you need to be very concise and shorten links. But on Twitter you can update more often about your latest posts, as the idea is that you are tweeting lots of other stuff in between. As long as you change the way you write your tweet and headline you can do the tweet to the same blog post. Also, on Twitter, you need to be retweeting, using hashtags, and @mentioning other users – and on the other social media platforms this a strange and unusual language!
4. Are you really saving time? Writing a blog post is far more time consuming than updating LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook with links to the blog. Even if you do these each separately it would only add 5-7 minutes extra to your time spent. Why not take this extra time and do these updates in a way that is appropriate for the platform?
5. There are other ways to share quickly: On your blog you could add social sharing buttons, so that whenever you write a blog post you can click these links at the bottom of the post (one for Twitter, one for Facebook) and this will then automatically update Facebook and Twitter with a bit of text and a link to your blog post. This way also allows anyone else reading the blog post to share the post on Twitter and Facebook if they wish to do so, in a quick and easy one-click way, directly from the blog post.

I hope that has convinced you for the good reasons above – autoposting the same update on all platforms is something you should be doing only SOMETIMES, or not at all! Much better to update mindfully, and differently according to the platform you are on!