A few days ago I put together a guide about communities, to explain newbies how communities work, why we need them and how to use them. You can read it here -> Communities Explained - Newbie Guide.
Based on the comments I've been getting, looks like it was needed and it seems like most of you want to know about cross posing as well. I touched the subject, but just barely as cross posting was not the main focus of the post, so today I'm back with a detailed guide on what cross posting is, how to use it and what's the difference between cross posting and reblogging.
I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible as for many of the users we have on the platform, English is not their first language, myself included. The purpose of this post is to make people understand, so don't look for academic levels here :) Let's start at the very beginning, with posting.
Posting
(For this demonstration, I'm going to use PeakD only and all the screenshots are taken from PeakD.)
As I mentioned in my previous post, you have the option to post on your blog, and/or in a community. It's up to you which one you choose.
You can start your post from your profile, by clicking the pen and you'll get what you see on the screenshot above. PeakD has "My Blog" as default option, so you need to pay attention to change that, if you want to post in a certain community. Once you posted a post on your blog, I suppose you can't change that, you can't edit the post and select a community. If this is not true, please correct me. (Also please don't delete any post with the purpose of reposting it in another community as that can be considered abuse! Leave it, you'll get it right next time.)
If you want to post in a community and you want to start from your own profile, first you need to join the community, in order to be able to select it when posting. The dropdown menu will only show the communities you have already joined.
This is why it is recommended to familiarize with the communities we have on Hive, join a few that you are interested in, both as a content creator (blogger) and content consumer (reader). You can find out how to do that in my previous post. Read the rules of each community, see which one fits your needs and join them.
If you know already in what community you want to post, you can go to that specific community and click "WRITE A POST" directly.
This way the community is automatically selected, even if you have not joined the community yet.
If you look at my profile, under my profile photo, you can see we have two sections, "Blog" and "All Posts". What you see on the screenshot above is the "All Post" view and those two posts have been posted in communities, not on my "Blog".
If you click the Blog tab on my profile, this is what you see. My post from 3 day ago
Add To Blog And Pin
The "Blog" tab is usually where you see the post you've reblogged (from other users) and your posts that have not been posted in a community or have been added to your blog later.
Let's say I posted in a community, but I'd like for that post to show up on my blog as well. I did that with my newbie guide post as I wanted to keep it on my profile.
By clicking the "All Posts" tab, you'll see all the posts you've written. Under each post, next to the comments, there's that arrow, which serves for adding the post to your blog.
By clocking on the arrow, this message will pop up with two options: confirm and cancel.
There's also a pinning option you can use. Pinning a post can be useful as every time you add a post to your blog and/or repost someone else's post, that goes on top and the older posts are pushed down.
I pinned a post the first time in four and a half years (the option is not as old though) because I wanted to keep it at hand in case I need to explain someone about communities. But people are using it for all kinds of reasons, like pinning their introduction post, their best post, the post with the highest payout, contests, challenges, you name it.
In order to pin a post, click the 3 dots next to the number of comments, a menu will pop up and you'll have the "Pin in Blog" option available. I'm not sure how many pinned posts you can have, that's a technical question you can ask from the PeakD guys on Discord but I don't think there are so many posts one wants to pin anyway.
Reposting Or Reblogging
These two terms mean the same thing and we have a few more, like share, reshare or rehive. This means you share or reblog another user's post for various reasons.
These posts will be visible on your profile, under the "Blog" tab and will look like on the screenshot above. This also means your followers will get those posts in their feed, even though they are not following those users.
Please be careful about how to use this option. Reblogging several posts a day can flood your followers feed, which in some cases can result in them unfollowing or muting you.
And NO, you don't get rewarded for reblogging other people's post :).
How To Cross Post
And finally we have arrived to the cross posting option. This option is available for both your posts and other user's post and it serves for giving more visibility to the post you are cross posting. For the sake of demonstration I'm going to cross post my last post, which is this.
It was posted in the BEER community and has not been reblogged to my blog yet.
Before I do anything, I need to determine where to cross post it. In order to do that, I need to see what the post is about and check a few communities, based on the topic of my post and also based on the community rules I'm choosing to cross post into.
If you read my post, you'll see it is about beer (obviously), about pizza, mugs and glasses and it is about photography as well as everything is photographed. So which community you would choose to cross post it to? Pizza and food is out of the question from the start as I only have one photo about a slice of pizza and it's not the main focus of the post, it would be abuse to cross post it to food or cooking community. Beer community we only have one, so what's left is a photography community and OCD (much about OCD later).
You can check how to search for communities as I have described in my previous post, but I already know my favorite photo community is Photography Lovers, therefore my next step is to check the community rules, let's see if cross posting is allowed.
It is allowed, but it says it won't be rewarded. This is fine by me and I'm going to tell you what it means later in this post. Now let's get on with the cross posting.
By clicking the 3 dots I told you about earlier, in the pop up menu, you'll have the "Cross post in" option. (Yeah, the correct form is cross post and not crosspost, now I have to go back to the beginning of my post and correct every single word referring to cross posting 😄)
A window will pop up with two fields you have to fill out and a message about how it works. First you need to select where you want to cross post and in order to do that, you first need to join the community as otherwise the desired community won't show up on that list.
Next field is for a short message to the community. It's up to you what you write, maybe it's possible to leave it blank but I decided to write what my post is about.
Next there's the message letting you know about the payouts and votes, which I'm going to write about in detail later. Let's finish cross posting first.
This is how my post looks like in the Photography Lovers community. Whoever is checking out the community feed can see it and there's a message letting them know it's a cross post.
Now let's do the same and cross post my post into the OCD community.
My post is visible now in the OCD community as well, the same way as in Photography Lovers.
What To Take Into Consideration Before Cross Posting
There are a few things you need to consider, before cross posting. One I already told you about, is is which community to cross post in and check if the community rules allow cross posting.
Next is how many times you want to cross post the same post. This is how the "All Blogs" section of your post will look like and your followers are going to see your post as many times you cross post it, plus the original. So my followers saw my post last night and they are going to get the two cross posts in their feed today, one after the other, because every time you cross post, a new post with the same content and different conditions than the original post is created.
If you click on of the cross posts, this is what you're going to see. A notification that the post is cross posted and please note, the rewards are declined as default, which means you can vote on the post, but the rewards are going to be sent back to the reward pool and redistributed, as the message in the pop up window said earlier. You're not going to get your usual curation rewards.
How it works: - Payout and rewards are automatically declined for the cross post - Votes on the cross post will be linked to the original post - Comments are allowed on the new post to separate the discussions in different communities - A reference to the original author and post will be automatically appended to your message.
If you want to reward the author and get your curation rewards too, it's better to go to the original post and upvote that one.
Photography Lovers community rules say "Cross Posting is allowed, but will not be curated". This means the curators won't reward the cross post or your original post. Users can vote for you, but your post won't be curated by the community curators, so cross posting will only serve for more visibility.
There's no rule on how many times you can cross post a post, but this is a free blockchain and there's a chance some of your followers will get tired of getting the same post several times a day, every day, that can lead to unfollowing or muting you.
You can cross post any post on the blockchain, regardless of who's the author, so imagine doing this to your followers with your own posts and a few others too, on a daily bases :)
Cross Posting To OCD Community
Previously in this post I've said you need to be careful where you cross post, choose the community based on the topic of your post and also make sure the community rules allow cross posting, otherwise you're risking to be muted by the community admin. OCD community is the only one (as far as I know) that allows cross posting, regardless of the topic of your main post. This is a good opportunity for newbies and new communities as well, to get more visibility, to let the world know about their existence.
Please note, cross posting in OCD community does not mean your post is going to get curated. This is just an opportunity for you to be noticed by the community members and curators.
Last, but not least I'd like to say thank you to the @peakd team, @jarvie and @asgarth for creating such a user friendly, easy to use frontend. Great work guys!
Looks like I've written a novel again, so sorry for that, but I don't know how to compress everything in a shorter post. Also please let me know if something is not clear enough.