2 Reasons You Should Never Link Your Social Media Accounts

If you’re just getting into this social media game for your business you’ve likely started realizing that it’s a lot of work to manage multiple accounts. It takes time, creativity, resources, and energy. Hopefully you have someone doing it for you if you’re the owner, but if you’re it, taking the shortcuts won’t get you very far either.

1) Double or Triple Posting:

So let’s imagine for a minute that you have a Twitter account and a Facebook account. You’ve linked it so whenever you post on your Twitter, it shows up on your Facebook page as well. You’ve just come up with this fantabulous post to promote your new product. It’s witty, it’s memorable, and you really think it will help get the word out. So you start with Facebook. The post get’s out, it gets likes, comments, and you’re doing great. Next you move to Twitter to tweet your way to some new engagement and interest around your product. You tweet the same thing you said on Facebook and hit go, only forgetting that your accounts were connected. Your Twitter post now shows up on your Facebook page and your followers are thinking, “what is this business doing?” because they see you’ve posted twice on Facebook with the same content.

Just following that, let’s say you have a LinkedIn account as well, you place the same post in there. AGAIN forgetting that you linked that to your Twitter. Now the post has gone out, it’s posted to LinkedIn, twice to Twitter, and now 3 times to Facebook. You did this just before you rushed out of the office, and didn’t see the results until the following day. Professional? I don’t think so.

2) Platform Specific:

The second reason, probably even more important, is that these different platforms need different content. By copy-pasting your posts across platforms, those who follow more than one will grow tired of seeing the same thing over and over. An moreover the likelihood of your Twitter link being just as popular on Facebook is not very high. Try being creative, and network specific. Facebook can be a great place for videos, Twitter is good for witty quick 1 liners with a link and a hashtag, and LinkedIn might be your close business network who want a more personal-style update about you or your business. The ways you use the networks will vary depending on your customers and audience, so do some experimenting.

If you’re trying to cut down on the time spent on these networks and crafting different posts, consider using a tool like Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows you to view multiple timelines and notifications from different networks. It allows you to post to any or all of your networks, or even schedule your posts to show up later in the day, next week or next month. This is a great tool for keeping productivity high. You can batch your social media tasks for one time slot of your day and spread the actual posts out over the entirety of it.

It may be more time consuming making customizations, but it will be infinitely more authentic and valuable to your followers to specialize your posts to your chosen networks.

Happy Marketing,

Joel M. Harrison