Where do you cross-post?

Do you cross-post/share anywhere other than DEV?

• Personal Site?
• Hashnode
• Medium
• LinkedIn Article (not post)

Share your experience, and whether cross-posting to anywhere else has helped build your community and drive meaningful engagement.

My current Process

I currently post all articles to my personal site waylonwalker.com, and they show up in my DEV dashboard as a draft. I fix the missing cover image, and language from code blocks and post when ready.

Some posts stop here.

Flagship posts get shared heavily

• Twitter
• DEV
• LinkedIn
• Newsletter

For flagship posts, I make sure that I share it to Twitter and LinkedIn.

My Twitter account is small beans so it drives very little engagement, that's hardly worth the effort. The same core friends that I have on Twitter also are connected on LinkedIn anyways.

For LinkedIn, I make sure that I summarize the article in 800-1300 characters, as I anticipate most people just read the summary on LinkedIn and move on without clicking the article.

I also attempt to keep up a monthly newsletter where I share all of my articles.

Discuss

Share with us if you have found benefit from cross-posting or sharing your articles somewhere else.

Comments

[Waylon Walker]

Would you recommend coil? Do you cross post full articles without changing?

[amananandrai]

The reach on Coil is not good but the reading experience is quite nice. Yes I cross post full articles with very little change. I would recommend Coil for people who wish to earn through web monetization protocol.

[Swastik Baranwal]

I don't do anywhere else.

[Waylon Walker]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

[Maheen]

Good work

[Waylon Walker]

Thanks Maheen

[rderik]

I cross post on the following sites:

• Reddit - When I post on I have more reach
• Linkedin - Post there but not many people read the posts when I do that
• Twitter - I mention my posts there but the engagement is super low.
• Dev.to - I post here just because I like the community, but also low engagement

I think that the best crossposting site would be reddit, there are lots of users and if you post it in a relevant topic people will be interested. I think that twitter is the worst for engagement. For me twitter is deceptive because you see people with 20K followers but when you see their posts they have around 30 likes or 5 retweets (low engagement). And the community isn't that welcoming/friendly.

I really want Dev.to to grow, the community here is much more welcoming than in any other site, which is why I tend to visit and also comment on people's posts

[Waylon Walker]

Any tips on reddit? I know nothing about it. I've tried to post there and go no engagement. Next time I tried to post I didn't even have enough karma.

I think they are all what you make of them. They definitely have their own quirks, but it seems that to build a community and engagement you need to be engaged and put the work in.

The DEV community has been the best to me as well 😉

[rderik]

It'll depend on the subreddit. For example, I write mostly on topics related to Swift. The Swift subreddit allows you to write posts, there are some subreddits that only let you share links (you can later add some description in a comment), so you will have to adapt. I tend to write a an excerpt of the post and give the key concept, and post the link to my full article on my site for anyone really interested.

If you look at the number of upvotes you might get tricked into thinking that it doesn't have much impact, but check your site statistics and it might tell a different story. And also a lot of people don't like to interact in public but they do read your content. Reddit has such a big number of users you get more exposure.

[Waylon Walker]

Thanks for the tips, those are really helpful for those of us yet to understand reddit.

[Vikram Chaudhary]

I have never tried reddit but twitter is quite engaging for me. It depends how often do you post and with what hast tags. Though I have created a bot which picks the posts from my blog and posts on Twitter thus reducing my manual work.

[Waylon Walker]

I had created a bot for mine at one point, but took it down as it started posting missing content. I built mine from the rss feed and a service that I can't remember right now. Going back I might do it with actions.

[Carlos Magno]

I started posting here, and now I’m starting to crosspost on medium. I’m also planning on start posting on a personal blog and maybe share it to LinkedIn.

[Waylon Walker]

Have you seen any benefit to cross-posting to Medium yet?

You should get started with your personal site sooner so that you can own that Canonical URL. A super simple way to do this without much effort from what I can tell is to connect dev to stackbit. Its free, and you can get your own URL for as low as $12 per month.

It may not have everything you want, but you can at least have something under your own URL for very little effort.

[Carlos Magno]

Not yet. I've been posting there for less than a month so I can't tell much.

Nice, it seems like a pretty easy and straight forward method for keeping up a personal blog. I'm going to take a look. Thank you for the suggestion!

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

My blog, but not always -- for the purpose of archiving, mostly.

Twitter is used just to share articles. Also, Facebook, where most of my real life friends are.

My LinkedIn is shit. I don't even think of perfecting it yet.

Also, I copy + paste everything to dev.to, rather than just post a link. I think it is a better etiquette.

Hashnode

Hashnode looks neat. Anyone tried it? Why not as popular as Medium?

Requests for Articles

This looks nice. I will consider contributing.

[Waylon Walker]

That is a really cool Section, I had no Idea there was a Request for Articles section.

I kinda like LinkedIn. It feels quite a bit different than any other platform. It's feeling a bit less formal each day, which I kinda like. That might just be based on who I follow though. I like that content lives for more than a few hours and generally drives engagement for 2-3 weeks after posting. You do need to form the post for LinkedIn, which kinda requires a summary to fit in their post length. No Idea if I get good conversion, but I get good 👍 and decent comments there.

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

I haven't had much time to make articles since I have been busy with video content, but if I were to blog high-quality posts I want to have it on my own domain name now.

When you are starting you and just building a base, you don't worry about the long-term by my mindset is shifting.

I just use Hashnode as my primary blog now because it respects canonical URLs, Hashnode supports custom domains meaning they canonical URLs Hashnode generates will have my domain and I honestly like their editor.

So my strategy is to post on my own domain and then use the Medium import tool, then I will create micro-content on Linked In and Twitter.

I currently don't cross-post to DEV because I am uncertain if DEV is implementing canonical URLs correctly. Another AWS Hero pointed this out to me when I was trying to onboard them to DEV. github.com/forem/forem/issues/9509

Also, DEV has another page it generates off your articles called comments that abridges your article showing a comments tree below it and this page is outranking my own articles because DEV doesn't point a canonical URL to your DEV or the original article.

I don't suspect anything malicious by DEV but I see these two issues as a hindrance to growing my own brand. I'm starting to care more about my organic traffic building up my domain's reputation and I put a lot of effort into my articles.

So I use DEV more like a watercooler now to engage with users, or I will make content on DEV that I am not using for long-term growth. Which is fine because DEV is a forum and I suppose it's not a blogging publication. So hate here, just have to adapt and understand how each platform works.

I have never been able to get Instagram to work. I am in awe of Samantha Ming's use of Instagram.

One place I cross-post is in many Discord and Slack channels and that has been a hidden viewership stream for me. I would like to start a newsletter one day, but time is limited LOL.

[Waylon Walker]

I am also in awe of @samanthaming 's amazing instagram content.

Thanks for the insights. I've been thinking about hashnode since you had mentioned it to me. I really like the format/platform. I really like how you own the domain, and they own the main feed. You can get up and going with a ton of features so easily.

🤞 Hopefully DEV fixes those features soon, they have such a great community here.

[Samantha Ming]

Thank you to you both for the kind words 💛 I'll do my best to continue to keep my content awe-worthy 😄

[Adam Greenough]

Webwide

[Waylon Walker]

That is a new one to me. I will check it out.

[Margo McCabe]

I cross post on our company blog, dev.to, and Dzone mainly. Then I share the link to these blogs on LinkedIn and Twitter. I have found that this is successful since folks like to access blogs from different places.

[Waylon Walker]

Any tips for driving engagement through LinkedIn and Twitter? Do you use the share button and post, or do you craft a custom message for each?

[Margo McCabe]

I usually craft a custom message! It makes for a more unique / sincere post. Maybe highlight your favorite quote or share a bit of background on what inspired you to write that specific article?

[Manyong'oments]

I did a little experiment with cross posting and the results were astonishing. TLDR; I get more engagement from decentralized application's, than I do on centralized applications.

I have experimented with other types of content, mainly tutorials and poetry. The spreadsheets don't lie.

Within a day:

• Uptrennd (most views)
• Cent -high views, before v3. 0
• Medium (low views, not surprised)
• Dev.to (so far, so good )
• LinkedIn ( like you said, people just read the summary, it's annoying )
• Publish0x (not much, unless the topic is specifically about Decentralized Finance )

[Waylon Walker]

There are several new ones to me there, thanks for sharing.