Many businesses try to save time and reach a larger audience by combining their social media accounts. What this means is you would create a single post that would then go to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. While this may sound great in theory, it can actually kill your social media campaign before it even begins. In the end, you don’t save time. You actually lose followers and spend far more time trying to get them back.

Different Audiences

Your customers enjoy different social networks for different reasons. While one customer may enjoy longer statuses on Facebook, a Twitter customer may hate receiving cut off tweets that they have to visit Facebook to finish reading. On Google+, you have circles for a reason. A status that works well for one circle, may not be appropriate for everyone. Since each network is different, the audience on each expects something slightly different as well.

Boring Followers

Odds are at least a small portion of your followers follow you on multiple networks. They don’t want to read the exact same posts on each network they follow you on. This screams lazy and stale, not the image you want to convey. Your followers expect at least slightly different posts on each network to prove you are actually taking the time to interact with them, not just market to them.

Different Formats

Every social network has a different format. Facebook offers up varying status lengths, notes, highlighted posts, images and apps. Twitter offers 140 characters and links for everything else. Pinterest allows you to share images and a caption instead of text based posts. Every post you make is not going to be appropriate for each network. You must customize your posts based upon the network it is destined for in order to achieve best results.

Lost Posts

When you use third party apps to manage your posts on multiple networks, they may actually end up lost. The most common example is Facebook. If a follower is a fan of five companies that use the same app to automate their posts, all updates are listed together. Only the first company’s update is actually shown and it is up to the user to expand the list. You don’t want your carefully crafted updates grouped with the competition.

It may seem like it takes more time, but the payoff is well worth the effort. Cater to your customer and social media becomes successful.