A Little Cross Promotion Etiquette

We received an email this morning that generated quite a bit of discussion around the office. Another company had reached out to us with an interesting offer: they would post content on their social media sites to promote HubSpot if we agreed to do the same for them. They wanted to leverage our social media following to promote their company, and were offering to reciprocate for us. What they were hoping for was essentially tit-for-tat cross-promotion.

But while there may be a knee-jerk reaction to accept these offers, it is important to always keep your followers in mind. Would they benefit from being exposed to this new entity? If not, your risk losing followers over link spamming.

Chances are, if the other entity is really offering something that could be valuable for your followers, you would find it in a blog post or article, and not through a direct email requesting cross-promotion.The best way to secure free promotion from another entity is to maintain a collection of useful and timely content that people naturally want to share with their followers. If your content is great, people will find it organically and then share it. Then there is no need to scratch anyone else's back to get them to scratch yours.