TwiBooklet has published an interesting article on why you should never use the cut and paste method for updating social networks with information. And I completely agree. That is, with everything but saying “Google+ is no Facebook”…I personally see them as two birds of the same feather …
But the point is, it can take you hours and even days to research and write an article that you want to share with your audience. If you’re going to that amount of effort, what’s another five minutes manually broadcasting to your followers about it? Seriously, what are you broadcasting to? Twitter? Facebook? Google+? Chances are it’s at least two of those so it won’t take you long to personalise your message a bit. And as the article says, it’ll give you a chance to:
- Stick within the character limits of each network
- Give you a chance to remove network specific artifacts, like hashtags you might use in Twitter but are useless on Facebook
- Modify wording so your message appears to be personally written to your audience.
Those are all positive things. However, one thing I would suggest keeping in mind
when manually updating broadcast messages over social networks is not to make your messages too different from one another.
As a social network user myself, I may follow a brand on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ at the same time. I don’t want to click on an update on Facebook, then click on an update on Twitter that sounds completely fresh only to be brought back to the same article. Make your updates personal, but also make sure your readers can tell when slightly different updates link to the same information. If you don’t, I think you’re going to annoy your followers into dropping you from at least one of their social networks.
And would it really hurt to add the odd update that’s unique to one particular network or another?
Maybe you can make a special offer for Facebook followers only, or maybe you post a coupon code to Twitter only. It surely can’t hurt to encourage users to follow you on more than one social network. In fact, it can stand to increase your exposure to other potential clients/customers through friends of friends who already follow you. All it takes is a little extra effort – minutes, not hours.
So kudos to TwiBooklet. It takes a lot of time to run a business, but they’re spot on the money in asking if shaving five minutes here or there is really worth it when you risk being labelled at best impersonal or at worst a spammer. It’s food for thought.
