I am not a fan of syndicated updates from brands – whether they’re from a third-party vendor such as Ping.FM, or integrated within your existing Facebook/Twitter profiles. We’re discussing the situation when an update is entered in one place and it posts that same message across all of the networks connected to that service. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a use for those in my social media mix. But when syndicated posts become thoughtlessly automatic, I question their effectiveness
for brands.

I have many concerns, but here’s my biggest: Each social network has different parameters, a different personality, and in most cases, a different audience. To entice your customers/prospects to take time to engage with your brand, you need to make sure you’re approaching them the right way. Think about it from a traditional media standpoint – would you take a newspaper ad and run it as-is for a TV commercial? That’s exactly how it is with new media. You need the appropriate message and delivery to catch your audience’s attention and to move them
to engagement.

Facebook offers a lot of opportunities for brands to engage people. Page updates can incorporate multi-media attachments (images, video, links) and can be tagged to include hot links to people’s profiles, events or other pages/groups within Facebook. This gives brands the platform to tell a rich story with extra visuals.

Conversely, Twitter’s tweets are short and much less inclusive of multi-media. Sure, you can add links to images and video, but they count as part of your 140 character limit. Twitter also incorporates @replies and #hashtags to help people understand the context of the message and who you’re talking to/about.

Bulk-messaging both Facebook and Twitter will often lead to failures in each channel. Messages created for Facebook are typically too long for Twitter and get cut off. Twitter updates that are pulled into Facebook are usually bland because they’re missing the additional content. How are either of those scenarios going to be encouraging to a customer who likes your Page or follows your brand on Twitter?

And one more thing. If you’re using syndicated posts to save time, are you remembering to follow up with the responses people may have posted in both mediums?

All I’m saying is that the point of social media is to engage and be interactive. Cutting corners through regular update syndication can potentially derail the efforts you’re making. What do you think?