As a small business, it’s important to be producing and sharing content across many platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Instagram stories, and Pinterest are the most commonly used social media platforms for businesses.

While creating content and sharing it is a great start, you can take it a step further by recognizing that not all content is suitable for every social media platform. Not only is posting different content on different platforms okay, but it’s also encouraged!

 

Understand Each Platform

Start by understanding what performs the best on each platform. Instagram is more visual, so it’s a great place to share photos and videos. Pinterest is a photo-driven search engine. While people are looking at photos on Pinterest, they are driven to those photos by the words that are in the descriptions. It’s important to describe what people will find if they click your image, both so that your people will click through to your website, and also so that they’ll be able to find your pin in the first place. Facebook is about nurturing a community around a certain topic, which makes it a great place to share content that you didn’t create that may be relevant to your page’s fans.

 

Understand Your Followers

Along with understanding the general guidelines for each platform, it’s also important to dig into your audience on each platform to understand who is

following you on each. Don’t assume that all of your followers are following you on every platform. You may find that prospective clients are following you on Instagram, while loyal clients are following you on Facebook. If you do have two different audiences, you may want to shift your content to reflect that.

How people interact with each platform is just as telling. On Instagram, people are looking for authenticity, so make it personal! Pinterest is a search platform, which makes it the right place to be educational and present yourself as an industry leader.  Facebook can be a healthy mix of both.

 

Creating Different Content

Sometimes, it’s just about optimizing the image size and the layout. While the ideal size of Instagram image is 1080px x 1080px, the ideal size for a Pinterest image is 600 px x 900 px. While Instagram images should be a 1:1 ratio, Pinterest images should be a 2:3 ratio.

Rather than starting from scratch to create new content for each platform, think about how you can optimize the content you’re creating to share it across each platform. For example, to promote a blog post, you can post a photo on Instagram and an infographic on Pinterest, but have them link back to the same place.

Since pinners can choose to follow just one of your boards, it’s important to pin content to each of the boards that it fits on. To avoid being repetitive, create different graphics or share photos from different angles.

 

Plan Ahead

If you work off of a content calendar, break down exactly what collateral you will need for each platform. If you’re doing a photoshoot, list out what shots you’ll need for Instagram and what shots you’ll need for Pinterest. If you’re creating an infographic, list out what information you want to include in the infographic for Pinterest, and a simpler version you can post on your Instagram Stories. Once you get into the habit of tweaking your content for each platform,

Optimizing your content for each platform doesn’t have to be hard. It’s just a matter of determining your purpose on each platform and who your audience is on each platform, then speaking directly to them.