The Fallacy of Syndication in Social Media

Made Essential Reading on 13 June 2011 Felix Hemsley

In all aspects of marketing, we’re forever discussing how content should be tailored to the audience, not out of a desire to multiply work, but because getting the right content to the right people really matters. From a social media perspective, the easy mistake is to stretch resources by jumping on board each and every platform that your target audience may be on and instead of taking the time to strategically review where best to focus your attention it can instead turn into a game of profile survival with content syndication becoming many marketeers’ saviour.

By syndication, I mean the automatic sharing of content from one social profile to another; for example you post a tweet and it appears on your linkedIn news feed. A fairly innocuous activity at first glance, simply sharing that one piece of information with all your contacts… But is it so innocuous? For all our talking about leveraging the social space and ensuring that what we’re saying is relevant, is this syndication a direct violation of our own social morals?

Before the ‘social explosion’ email was (and very often still is and for good reason) a primary channel for targeted communications. Databases can be analysed and segmented in any manner of ways, ensuring that the emails are relevant to each of the partitions. Now imagine a database which is divided into four groups, potentially each group is at a different stage in the buying cycle or have different responsibilities within an organisation so have different pain points and touch points. To satisfy these four groups, we would need four different emails, each tailored to the specific group ensuring maximum relevancy and ROI. Now put all these four groups together, they still all buy the same product just in different ways, but instead of receiving one email they now receive four. What’s the outcome? A very low ROI and potentially complaints about the spamming of their accounts.

Despite the obvious flaws in this strategy it is the same dynamic that content syndication in the social space can follow if not used effectively. Look at your profiles and see how they’re linked up, see where you could cut the link and consider leveraging your content in a more aligned manner.

I’m not saying “never syndicate”, adding #FB or #in to your tweets once in a while is no bad thing and some sites such as Instagram are ideal for linking to a Posterous, Tumblr or Twitter account, but not all social platforms are so versatile.

Look at your audience, look at your content and consider who would benefit from having access to it. A successful social media strategy can be as tailored as you want it to be, and you really want it to be as tailored as possible!