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Smart guide to social media cross-promotion
Social media cross-promotion: 7 smart ways to grow your reach
Social media cross-promotion lets you take great content and give it a second or third life, amplifying your reach across platforms and in front of new audiences.
When you adapt your message for each channel, you create a ripple effect that boosts visibility and builds meaningful connections with potential customers. With the right approach and tools to schedule social media posts, this strategy becomes one of the smartest ways to grow without burning out your content team.
Read on to discover smart tactics, valuable insights, and how to make them work for your brand, all essential steps in building a successful cross-promotion strategy.
What is cross promotion on social media?
Social media cross-promotion is a marketing strategy where individuals, brands, or teams intentionally share and promote content across different platforms, sometimes in collaboration with others.
The goal is to reach broader, yet relevant, audiences and increase visibility while optimizing resources.
When you cross-promote content, you create new connections that take audiences from one touchpoint to another instead of keeping content siloed.
Common types of social media cross-promotion
Cross-promotion isn’t one-size-fits-all, because the way you share and amplify content should depend on your goals, your audience, and the platforms you use.
What works for a brand collaborating with a major influencer might look completely different from a local business repurposing a blog post across channels.
From resharing your content to running co-branded campaigns, here are five popular cross-promotion ideas marketers use to expand reach and connect with aligned audiences:
1. Cross-posting content
Often, the quickest wins come from content you’ve already created. Cross-posting on social media allows you to share the same core idea across multiple platforms, making small adjustments to fit each one.
But be careful about adaptation when repurposing content. As Sophie Miller, Founder of Pretty Little Marketer, explains
You can’t just copy and paste the same post everywhere and expect it to work. Each platform has its own vibe.
Tools like Planable help with cross-promotion, letting you preview posts side by side for multiple social media platforms and tweak visuals or copy so the content feels native everywhere it appears.
Social media posts list view in Planable
2. Influencer and brand partnerships
When the right brands collaborate, everybody wins, including your target audience.
Partnering with influencers or businesses that share your target audience can open doors to thousands of potential customers who are already interested in what you offer.
The most successful cross-promotion efforts come from aligning brand values and delivering something meaningful to both audiences, whether that’s a shared campaign, a product bundle, or a joint cause.
To find the right cross-promotion partners, look for those whose audience overlaps with your target market, whose brand voice complements yours, and whose reputation will enhance your credibility.
3. Guest content
Guest posts, interviews, or co-branded content are a tried-and-true way to get in front of a new target audience without advertising costs. This might mean writing for a partner’s blog, sharing a joint Instagram Reel, or showing off expertise in a co-authored LinkedIn tutorial.
Take a cue from Sophie Miller’s Industry Insider interview series, which features experts and takes full advantage of the power of minds combined.
The full interviews are exclusive to my blog, but I promote them everywhere else with strategic teasers. I’ll do a LinkedIn carousel with the key takeaways, share highlights in my email blast, and post clips on Instagram stories with direct links.
And she adds something essential: be helpful. Don’t cross-promote just for the sake of it.
When you give someone access to something exclusive and valuable, they naturally want to share that they have access to it. It’s social currency, really.
4. Webinars and live events
Few formats generate as much cross-promotional content and audience engagement as live events. Webinars, Instagram Lives, and panel discussions create pre-event hype, real-time comments, and post-event highlights that work across multiple channels.
The key is mapping out how each platform will play its part in cross-promotion and follow-up.
Planable supports this process by giving teams one place to plan, schedule, and coordinate posts, so every piece of event content is timed and aligned for maximum reach.
The platform’s collaboration features facilitate sharing ideas, drafts, and final posts with webinar guests or partners, keeping everyone on the same page and ensuring there are no delays or bottlenecks.
You can manage several social media accounts or campaigns and create customized approval layers for each.
Add custom approval layers in Planable
5. Social sharing incentives
The best promotion comes directly from your audience if you pay attention and create opportunities for User-Generated Content (UGC).
Contests, giveaways, loyalty programs, and referral programs can turn followers into advocates, encouraging them to share your content with their networks.
Sophie Miller lets you in on a little (marketer) secret:
The ‘you can’t get this anywhere else’ approach works incredibly well because it gives people a real reason to take action.
Use the right incentive with your audience, and you won’t just increase reach but build a sense of exclusivity and community around your brand.
Why cross-promotion is a marketer’s secret weapon
Cross-promotion works on multiple levels. You get your content in more places, yes, but you also improve the quality of social media interactions.
Here’s why it’s worth weaving into your social media strategy:
- Increase brand awareness – Sharing content across platforms puts you in front of people who might never have found you otherwise, often at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. It’s gold for brand visibility.
- Build brand reputation – When a respected partner decides to cross-promote your content, their endorsement makes your brand instantly more trustworthy to potential new customers.
- Get more engagement from existing content – Repurposing and adapting posts extends their life and helps them perform in new contexts, while reducing the burden on your team. A cross-promotion campaign is a form of cost-effective marketing that maximizes the value of what you’ve already created.
- Strengthen brand recognition – Seeing consistent themes across various social media platforms reinforces who you are and what you stand for to existing customers, making your brand easier to remember compared to direct competitors.
7 social media cross-promotion strategies to try
Cross-promotional marketing should be intentional and well-planned. Randomly posting across platforms or tagging partners isn’t enough to make a real impact. The key is to combine creativity with structure, so your content feels fresh in every context and still works toward a clear goal.
These 7 strategies will help you approach cross-promotion in a way that’s both tactical and repeatable:
1. Align your message with your collaborator
When working with a partner brand or influencer, a shared goal is essential. Without it, your cross-promotion campaign can feel disjointed or confusing.
Your audience can tell if a partnership is just for marketing purposes, and that can have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.
To get the most out of collaborative marketing, start by agreeing on the purpose, whether that’s driving sign-ups, boosting brand awareness, or launching a product.
After that, create a simple messaging framework that outlines key points, tone of voice, and what’s off-limits. You can use tools like Planable for easy real-time feedback and comments on a brief, for example.
Post draft with real-time feedback comments and suggestion in Planable
The social media posts you draft should be in line with the messaging guidelines. This ensures that every post feels cohesive, even if it’s coming from different accounts.
A consistent, unified message shows authenticity, makes your campaign more memorable, and ensures you implement cross-promotion effectively.
2. Adapt your content for each platform
Copy-pasting content across platforms is tempting, but rarely effective. Each social media channel has its own audience behavior, tone, and visual style.
The key is to pay attention to the format, fractional CMO Neal Schaffer says:
Some formats, such as livestream content or horizontal videos, can be repurposed without adapting to specific platforms. When it comes to short-form videos, I also believe the same content can be cross-posted on other platforms, although over time, I might tweak the content focus as well as captions to make it more relevant to one social network over another.
In Planable, you can preview posts exactly as they’ll appear on each platform and use the calendar view to ensure every adapted piece still fits neatly within your overall campaign.
Social media calendar view in Planable
3. Use cross-promotion to test content formats
Many marketers think cross-promotion is only for spreading already published content. But it’s also a great way to experiment.
Share a new format, like a short-form video or carousel, on one platform and watch how the audience responds before you cross-promote it elsewhere.
Sophie Miller calls this her “Test and build” approach:
- start small
- see what resonates
- then expand
She shares an example where she tested a simple idea as a quick LinkedIn post and was surprised by the response: high engagement and comments asking for more detail.
She then reworked it into a detailed Instagram case study with visuals and actionable steps, which reached a broader audience. “Same insight, different execution, different results”, she explains.
This shows that strong content often starts small and grows when adapted for the right platform.
As a Marketing Specialist, Neal Schaffer recommends identifying one strategic platform where you go deep with original content, using cross-promotion to test and adapt that content for other platforms.
This way, your most important channel gets your best effort, while the rest still benefit from strong, validated ideas.
4. Build long-term partnerships, not one-offs
One-off collaborations can create a spike in engagement, which isn’t bad. However, ongoing partnerships that make sense for everyone involved deliver greater benefits.
Think regular social media takeovers, quarterly co-branded webinars, or a recurring LinkedIn Live series with the same partner. Over time, audiences come to expect and look forward to these joint efforts, deepening their connection with both brands.
Long-term collaborations also make it easier to refine your cross-promotion strategies, because you can learn from each campaign and improve together.
They also help maintain stronger customer relationships by showing consistency and shared values across brands.
5. Track what works (and where)
Cross-promotion needs optimization just as any other marketing strategy.
Measure success by monitoring metrics like referral traffic, conversions, engagement rates, and follower growth from each platform and partner.
Tracking helps you understand which channels deliver the best results and which collaborators bring the most value.
For example, Sophie Miller recounts that data from her PLM Summer School campaigns revealed something surprising:
One unexpected insight came from Summer School promotion – Instagram Stories were driving way more registrations than feed posts, even though feed posts had higher engagement numbers. The data showed that Stories created more urgent, immediate action, whilst feed posts were better for building awareness and social proof. This completely changed how I structure cross-promotion campaigns now.
Measuring results from each platform and partner helps you understand the true impact of your cross-promotional campaign and what to focus on next time. With Planable’s cross-channel reports, it’s easy to see the full picture and make smarter decisions for next time.
Planable’s cross-channel analytics setup
6. Stagger your content timing
Posting similar content everywhere at once can create a momentary splash, but then it’s over.
Staggering your posts keeps the conversation going and gives your audience multiple opportunities to engage.
For example:
- share a teaser on Instagram Reels
- then the full content on YouTube a few days later
- and a LinkedIn carousel with key takeaways two weeks afterwards
This way, you remind people of valuable content in a fun and diverse way, increasing the likelihood that they’ll pay attention.
Scheduling tools like Planable help you achieve efficient cross-promotion, letting you plan and space out posts for maximum reach, with an eye on keeping the social media calendar balanced.
Social media post recycling setup in Planable
7. Add CTAs that drive traffic between platforms
Smart social media managers explicitly tell people where to go next in the buyer’s journey. A LinkedIn post can point to an Instagram carousel for behind-the-scenes content, or a TikTok clip can link to the full product tutorial on YouTube.
These CTAs work best when they offer exclusive value, something the audience can only get by clicking through.
CMO Neal Schaffer takes a different view here, which is worth considering:
I actually don’t try to move people between platforms. People are on platforms for a reason, and it is in your best interest to work with each of the social media algorithms to keep them there! The only time when I might hint at encouraging my followers to move between platforms is a podcast watermark I leave on short-form videos, but I never specifically ask them to download the podcast. This is an example of what I call “Platform Authentic Content,” or making content for the platform instead of trying to create content to move away from the platform.
His perspective is a useful reminder that CTAs should fit both your goals and the platform’s dynamics.
The two tactics don’t exclude each other. Think strategically about what your goal is and decide whether you need to move people to other platforms or if keeping them there makes more sense.
Grow your brand credibility with smart cross-promotion
Cross-promotion is a clever way to boost visibility with your target audience without constantly reinventing the wheel.
Start small, test a few strategies, and track what delivers results. Stay consistent, think long-term, and your reach will grow over time.
Planable make it easier for you and your team to plan, adapt, and execute campaigns across channels, so you achieve better results with less effort.
If you’d like to see how you can use the platform to cross-promote content on social media platforms, give it a try. The first 50 posts are free of charge!