Cross promotion is all about using one platform or social network to promote another, and back again. The benefits being, if you can get fans or followers to promote you by retweeting/posting/sharing your content on more than one platform, you are instantly increasing your audience and reach.
Here are three easy ways you can cross-promote your small business, brand or product. Please don't forget to leave a comment if you found these tips useful.
I have a problem with my twitter username. When I decided to change my internet name to Katy Clouds, I was pretty confident I had found a name that noone else was using in the way I wanted to use it. I left twitter to last because it was the only one that was going to allow me to change my username rather than setting up a new account or profile.
The username I wanted was taken, so I am @katyclouds on instagram and @katy_clouds on twitter.
It doesn't matter much, and I don't think it's lost me any followers. However, it's important you are cohesive across all platforms if you are trying to build a brand.
Having the same profile picture helps, and similiar cover photos for twitter & Facebook also give a strong branded image and let potential followers coming over from one platform know that they have found the right you.
Here's an example from The Turner Brothers Facebook and Twitter pages.
You can find dimensions out for all the social networks profile images here.
(I'd be interested in linking a smaller blog here, if you have provided this information in some way on your blog or webpage, please let me know, I would prefer to support a small blogger!)
You could also use Picmonkey if you want to create your own cover photo collages or make sure your images are sized right with their templates. It's free, and possibly the best image editor available online for free at the moment,
So, you want your Instagram followers to check out your brand's Facebook page. You are putting the link in your photo descriptions and in your bio but you don't seem to be picking up many followers.
Think about it. How often do YOU bother looking at peoples bios to find their links and follow them? The internet is making us increasingly lazy, and the shorter number of clicks the better to gain followers, fact.
So I use a little tactic that has proved really successful. It involves creating an image to share your information. An image which can then be posted across ALL platforms, including instagram. I'd like to share a quick tutorial for doing this using Picmonkey (I just can't get enough, it really does rock)
1. Select a suitable image.
I'm going to use Picmonkey's collage option to create a 3 x 3 collage of images for my sharable picture. You can skip this and just use one but I want a high impact, exciting image as my backdrop and I have enough pictures stored to do this super easily.
2. Turn it into a backdrop
Chose 'Edit' at the top to convert your collage into one image and make it available for editing. You can skip making it black and white if you want. In this case, because some of the photos I chose are not full colour, I thought it would look better if they were all black and white. The option to do this is under the little wand symbol on the far left of the Edit screen.
Now we are going to put a screen over the image to make the text stand out against it.
Use the 'overlays' option to cover your whole picture in a big black square.
Then, change Colour 1 to white (in fact, it doesn't have to be white, if a pink or blue screen would work for your brand, give it a shot!) and turn the fade slider up to 50.
The result should look something like this:
3. Add info.
The aim of this image I am creating is to tell the bands growing instagram following how they can find The Turner Brothers on facebook. You could easily use the same tactic on twitter to tell followers how to find you on Pinterest, or even include multiple ways to get in contact.
And it's ready to share :) I'll be posting this on the band's instagram feed later today. This only took me ten minutes and I was writing this tutorial at the same time. Let me know if you give this idea a go.
So you've got your cohesive branding sorted and you've been creating images to share across multiple platforms. How can you keep the momentum going?
Make sure you save everything you create to post. The image above obviously wouldn't be useful to post on twitter, but as well as instagram it could be used to promote the band on Facebook as a post on it's own and a photo comment, Pinterest, Google+....
Some other ways you could recycle content in this way to increase your content cross promotion:
- Whilst editing images, create a few variations. Change the text to promote your insta feed and use the image a few weeks later on Twitter.
- Repost/retweet previously posted content on a different social network with a cheeky "Did you see this shot of our studio/performance/merchandise yet?"
- Create a collage as an image to post using images you have already shared (a great tactic for dull weeks when you haven't got much new content to share, and creating collages takes only a few seconds in most image editing programs) Save them to use as a backdrop for future info sharing posts too, now that's multi-tasking!
DON'T FORGET:
- Spread things out. Don't post the same image on three networks in the same day.
- Don't over saturate your followers. Most people won't want to see seven or eight posts a day of the same sort of thing.
- Make cross-promotion only 10% of your content. The industry standard is 70% lifestyle, 20% direct promotion (this would encompass the types of posts we have discussed here as well as direct links to products) and 10% promotion of similar or aligned products or brands.
Let me know if you have any questions, I hope this was helpful!
Katy x
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