Leveraging only one social media platform doesn’t work. Neither does posting the same content on all existing social media channels. In this article, we’ll uncover why you should repurpose content across your social media and why mere pitiful cross-posting is dead.
Why Diversify Social Media Content
Your social media audience is so different. Even if your product or service is for a super narrow audience, there are people who like to consume content very differently within this audience, no matter how small or narrow it is. For example, some of them digest texts better; for some, videos are the best way to learn, and some of your customers can't help but study infographics and histograms.
💡Suggested read: How to Market to Gen Z Audiences on Social Media And Win Them Over
That said, your diverse audience is the reason why your content should be diverse, too.
Another reason for content diversification is motivating people to follow you on all your social media channels. If you post the same content on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn without changing it at all, people will see no reason to follow you on more than one of these channels.
Why is having all your followers on only one platform risky? If you have your entire audience following only one of your channels, you'll lose your audience (and sales) if this account is blocked or this whole platform is banned in your country of residence.
💡Suggested read: 8 Ways to Save Customers and Stay Afloat if Instagram is down again
To simply be on the safe side, you should be omnipresent. You should, but your customers shouldn't. Some of your target audience's segments may not use Instagram or TikTok, but a big part of those do, and you need to get discovered by them.
The third reason for diversification is to make the content look organic within a certain social media platform. Social media prioretise content that is made uniquely for this particular channel, with all the specifications, requirements, and audience taken into account.
And the final reason is that content diversification allows you to look at your current content from a different angle and share the same blog article or video with distinct captions and diverse messaging.
Now when we’re good with the reasons, let’s talk about content diversification strategies.
How to Diversify Social Media Content
Let’s take a look at these three strategies of how you can keep your content diversified. No worries, we’re not suggesting you should create entirely new content for each platform.
Diversification Strategy 1: Scheduled Cross-Posting
Take one content piece and share it on all of your channels on various days. For example, take a blog post and share it with your Instagram followers the same day you posted it on your blog, then share it on LinkedIn in two days, and in a week – on Twitter with different messaging.
What’s the point? You refer to your other social media channels in every single share. People follow your reference and visit your other channel.
💡Here's how you can schedule Instagram posts & stories to go live automatically with Combin Scheduler:
- Install Combin Scheduler.
- Log in to your Instagram account within Scheduler.
- Once you are logged in, Scheduler automatically locates you at the posts scheduling page.
- Click Add New Post at the bottom of the application window to start planning your post.
- Drag and drop images or click Choose Photo to select pictures for the post.
- Add text for caption into the input field. Intervals, paragraph breaks, symbols and emoji will remain unchanged in the published post.
If you want to, you can tag location in the post. Type the name of the place into the Location input field.
7. Select the posting date and time. Scheduler synchronizes with the timezone of your OS.
8. Click Post Now. Your post will be published at the scheduled time.
Keep Combin Scheduler launched until your posts are on Instagram. If the look of the opened Scheduler window annoys you, leave the application running in the background instead of quitting it.
Diversification Strategy 2: Content Targeted at a Specific Platform
This point means you change the whole content creation process. First, you build the idea of your upcoming posts and then tailor it to different social media platforms.
This approach allows you to work with 'global' content ideas for all of your channels with no need to create a social media strategy for each channel.
For instance, you’ve come up with an idea to create a case study post of how your service helped your client X increase their productivity. Make an outline of what you’re going to tell and then customise content depending on the platform (create a Twitter thread, a long read for LinkedIn, cards for Instagram, make a podcast with the client, etc.).
For this, you need to know which content types are available on the platform and which specifications you should keep in mind. We’ll talk about these a bit later.
Diversification Strategy 3: Social Media Content Repurposing
When you repurpose content, you change its format. For example, take a blog article, find a piece from it that would be interesting and comprehensible without context, and make the following content pieces out of it:
- Instagram carousel cards;
- A quote post;
- Infographics;
- A TikTok video, Reel, or a YouTube video;
- A Twitter thread;
- A podcast;
- A Quora answer;
- A SlideShare presentation, etc.
This is the repurposing to make one or several small pieces out of a bigger content piece.
Alternatively, you can create large content pieces out of several smaller ones, such as:
- Ultimate guides and tutorials based on several articles;
- eBooks;
- Newsletters;
- Online courses, etc.
This ‘bigger’ content piece should look consistent and coherent whole, not as a compilation of random materials.
You can mix this approach with the other two and share the same content differently on various platforms.
Specific Features of Social Media Platforms
We'll touch on the media specifications and requirements, the number of characters allowed for a post, and available content forms.
Before you read, take a look at the stats of how different audiences of these social media platforms:
⚡️Main social media platforms' audiences differences
⚡️Telegram audience demographics
Even though you don't have to leverage all the social media platforms we mention below, you should at least try to use all content forms available on the platform.
Use as many content types as you can within one channel, making your account interesting for your target audience. Besides, thus you'll be able to analyse which types perform better.
Caption characters limit: 2,200
Images and videos specifications: Check our full size guide of Instagram content for 2022
Available content types: Single feed photo, image carousel, single feed video, Reel, stories (including AR lenses and multiple tags), Guides, shopping posts, live streams, and NFT collectibles.
Audience: 18-24 (31%) and 25-34 (31%) years of age, 48% female, 52% male.
Tweet character limit: 280
Images specifications:
Perfect image size and aspect ratio – 1200px x 675px and 16:9. GIFs specs: 1280 px x 1080 px
Maximum file size for photos and GIFs – 5MB; 15MB if you’re posting via the Twitter web.
You can tweet up to four images per post. Image files must meet all of the following criteria:
Supported image media types: JPG, PNG, GIF, WEBP
Videos specs:
- Recommended frame rates: 30 FPS, 60 FPS
- Recommended video resolution: 1280x720 (landscape), 720x1280 (portrait), 720x720 (square)
- Recommended aspect ratio: 16:9 (landscape or portrait), 1:1 (square)
- Frame rate must be 60 FPS or less
- Dimensions must be between 32x32 and 1280x1024
- File size must not exceed 512 MB
- Duration must be between 0.5 seconds and 140 seconds
- Aspect ratio must be between 1:3 and 3:1
Available content types: Text tweets, videos, GIFs, images, polls, Spaces (audio chats), Moments, threads.
Audience: 18-29 years of age, 61% male, 39% female.
YouTube
Images and videos specifications:
Recommended dimensions: 426 x 240 (240p), 640 x 360 (360p), 854 x 480 (480p), 1280 x 720 (720p), 1920 x 1080 (1080p), 2560 x 1440 (1440p) and 3840 x 2160 (2160p).
Aspect ratio is 16:9 (auto adds pillarboxing if 4:3).
Max file size is 128GB or 12 hours, whichever is less.
Accepted video formats include: .MOV, .MPEG4, MP4, .AVI, .WMV, .MPEGPS, .FLV, 3GPP, and WebM.
Max video length is 12 hours.
The perfect YouTube video thumbnail size is 1280 pixels by 720 pixels. These YouTube thumbnail dimensions use an aspect ratio of 16:9.
Shorts specifications are as follows:
- Recommended dimensions: 240×426 (240p), 360×640 (360p), 480×854 (480p), 720×1280 (720p), 1080×1920 (1080p), 1440×2560 (1440p), and 2160×3840 (2160p),
- Aspect ratio is 9:16.
- Video length is 60 seconds max.
- Accepted video formats include: .MOV, .MPEG4, MP4, .AVI, .WMV, .MPEGPS, .FLV, 3GPP, and WebM.
- Music from the YouTube music library is limited to 15 seconds.
- Title character limit: 100 characters.
Available content types: Videos, Shorts, live streams, Community posts.
Audience: 15-35 years of age, 46% female, 54% male.
TikTok
Images and video specifications: TikTok video dimensions should be 1080×1920. Aspect ratio – 9:16. 1:1 is also possible, but it won't take up the whole screen.
Available content types: Videos, live streams.
Audience: 10-19 years of age (25%), 61% female, 39% male.
Characters limit: 500 characters for board and pin descriptions
Images and videos specifications: Board cover photo is 222 × 150 px, Pin sizes (Portrait) – 735 × 1,102 px.
Available content types: Pins (image posts), Idea Pins (stories), Pinterest Board (collection of Pins), video pins, Carousel Pins (pin with multiple images).
Audience: 50-64 (38%) years of age. 78% female, 22% male.
Snapchat
Characters limit: 80 characters for a snap
Images and video specifications: The recommended size for a video is 1080 x 1920, with an aspect ratio of 9:16. Your video can't be longer than 10 seconds or bigger than 32MB. 1,080 pixels wide by 1,920 pixels tall. 9:16 ratio.
Available content types: Images (Snaps), videos, stories, video notes (10-second videos), audio notes (10-second audio).
Audience: 15-25 years of age (48%), 54.4% female, 44.6% male.
Characters limit: 3,000 (500-600 words)
Images and videos specifications: LinkedIn post (single or multi-image): 1080 x 1080 (square) 1920 x 1080 (portrait).
- LinkedIn article featured image: 1200 x 644
- LinkedIn article banner image: 600 x 322
- LinkedIn carousel post: 1080 x 1080 OR 1920 x 1080
- LinkedIn carousel best format: PDF
- LinkedIn video size: 256 x 144 (minimum) to 4096 x 2304 (maximum)
- LinkedIn video file size: 75KB to 200MB
- Maximum LinkedIn video length: 10 minutes
- LinkedIn Stories image size: 1080 x 1920
- LinkedIn event logo size: 300 x 300 - square
- LinkedIn event ‘banner’ size: 16:9 ratio so 1600 x 900 pixels works
Available content types: Feed posts (text-only, one-image posts, multiple-image post, document post, video, polls, hiring posts, etc), articles, carousel posts, live videos,
Audience: 25-34 (58.4%) years of age, 48% female, 52% male.
Characters limit: 63,206 (yes, this long 😱)
Images and videos specifications: 1280 by 720 pixels with a minimum width of 600 pixels for images.
Supported aspect ratios are 16:9 (horizontal), 9:16 (full portrait), 2:3 (vertical), 4:5 (vertical), square (1:1)
If you’re planning on creating a 360 video, here’s what you need to know about optimising it for your target audience.
Maximum size is 4096 by 2048 pixels, 2:1 aspect ratio.
Minimum size is 600 pixels wide.
Recommended specs are .MP4 format, maximum file size 1.75GB, maximum length 40 min, maximum frame rate 60fps.
Available content types: Text posts, photo posts, videos, live streams, stories.
Audience: 25-34 (31.5%) years of age, 43% female, 57% male.
Telegram
Characters limit: 4,096 for text-only post, 1,024 for media containing post
Images and video specifications: Video circles (messages) should be up to one minute long.
Telegram doesn’t cut images, so if you share an 800 x 600 image, it will be uploaded exactly as you intend to share it. You can upload square images (800 x 800) as well as rectangular ones of 800 x 400 or 800 x 600.
Upload file size should be no bigger than 10 MB.
Available content types: Video circles, text-only posts, images (10 images for one post are available), polls and quizzes, live streams, voice chats (for up to 5,000 users) and voice messages, articles (ranked on search engines, made through bots like @telegraph or @TeletypeAppBot).
You can create channels (public and private) and chats.
Audience: 700 million users a month (with less than 10 million of the US audience using Telegram on a monthly basis). 41.4% female users and 58.6% male users. The largest age group is 25-34 years of age.
Social Media Content Diversification: The Bottom Line
Diversification and repurposing of social media content help you fill up your content plan with new ideas and formats without the need to come up with entirely new posts for all platforms and yet share the same content with a fresh view. Use the strategies we talked about above to streamline your content creation process and stick to those you like best.