Just wondering if anyone has ideas around best practices for cross posting articles?
I recently setup [email protected] and mainly only post to that community, with no cross posting.
My thinking was that it’s probably best for subscribers/readers to crosspost to other communities, rather than me “spamming” the articles to other communities.
But I’m not sure it’s the best way to go, since it’s kind of hard to get traction with a new community initially.
Any thoughts on what is a good practice way to go about increasing visibility of the community a bit more, without annoying people? Or is it maybe best to stick to the current approach and let things happen organically?
Edit: I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback on this post. I got a lot of useful info, and will incorporate your suggestions in future.
You must log in or # to comment.
Crossposting usually favors the older post in most UIs I’ve used. Which is good for general browsing but not ideal for growing a community. I feel like [email protected] suffers from this sometimes since articles shared there are also shared in other news / politics communities first.
That’s to say I don’t really have an answer for you, lol, but subscribed.
Cross-posting causes the posts to be de-duplicated in most clients, which can mean that whichever post takes off, cannibalizes the votes from the others, meaning discovery suffers for the communities where the post didn’t take off.
To work around this, I cross-post things that fit in many communities with a time delay of at least three hours.
I post first to the smallest community, which allows that post to stand on its own, as much as it can, bringing users to that community. With few subs it’ll mostly get seen by people browsing all, rather than subscribers. Which is good, that’s how small communities get found by new subscribers.
Then, once the first post to the actual community has stopped getting votes (which happens quicker the smaller the community) I cross post to the next biggest community. This consequent post often gets more attention, but it now links to the small community, which will be found by some fraction of users seeing the cross-post.
You won’t annoy people too much doing this, as posts to small new communities don’t get seen by that many people before they essentially disappear from all. But as the community grows and votecounts increase, posts will gain more sustaining power as they sink slower the more votes they get.
Eventually the subcount will get big enough that posts will stay fairly high in all for a good while due to subscribers upvoting them. At this point, you might start simultaneously posting to other communities.
I also like to leave comments of posts in big communities, that could be cross-posted to a small community I know. I did this a lot with [email protected] so people posting and browsing to general gaming communities could find the new game community in the comments of relevant posts, and I’m fairly sure that’s why it is so active.
Some best practices I (try to) follow:
- Post to the smallest community first
- Add some body text
This ensures that future crossposts quote the body text and include a link to the original post. (Not all clients do this automatically, but the official web interface does)
