One of the most important things for any digital business is to insure that you have a solid online presence. With a ton of different companies out there, and more every year, you may broadcast on Twitch, have your VODs uploaded to YouTube, promote to Instagram and Twitter, and have unique sponsor pages for your community to make purchases that support your content.
Creating accounts and being active on social media sites where your viewers, supporters, and customers engage is a great first step, but when you have audiences on multiple platforms you can miss out on support if those accounts aren't cross-linked.
In this resource we'll be answering 3 questions:
- What is Cross-Linking?
- Why is Cross-Linking Important?
- How does CLS fit in and what process do we use for CLS Account Verification?
What is Cross-Linking?
Connecting social media, or any other accounts on websites, to one another through navigational links. This allows anyone who clicks on the link to navigate out to the connected platform, while also having a link to get back once they get there. This shows an official connection between the two accounts.
For example, if you visit the CLS Twitter account you'll see this link to our website in our profile:
This creates 1 way navigation for those who find us on Twitter to locate our website.
On the CLS website, if you go to the bottom of any page you can see an icon containing a link back to our Twitter profile:
This second link back to the Twitter account creates the cross-link, since both pages are linking to one another. Simple, right?
Cross-Linking can be used even if you don't have a website of your own to connect different social media accounts as it has some important benefits.
Why is Cross-Linking Important?
There are 2 key reasons to cross-link your accounts: Discovery and Validation.
Discovering New Ways To Engage & Support
This is the obvious benefit. By cross-linking social accounts you inform the people you engage with on one platform that they can also do so on another. This is often used by livestreamers to treat their primary broadcasting host (Twitch, Mixer, Youtube, etc) as a hub with the social media accounts (Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc) as spokes to that hub.
Those with CLS accounts and personal websites will also set these as the hubs instead as more information can be conveyed while the broadcasting channels are optimized specifically towards community engagement during the stream.
Validate Ownership Of Social Media Accounts
Not everyone online tells the truth. Shocker, we know. Between fan accounts, parody accounts, and individuals creating similar accounts for more malicious activities, it can be hard to tell which accounts are legitimate.
However, by cross-linking profiles you automatically verify that you own both accounts as only the account owner can make those kinds of changes.
How does CLS fit in and what process do we use for CLS Account Verification?
CharityLiveStream.com is a platform built to help promote livestream fundraisers and personal projects while automatically adding the work you do into the portfolios of everyone involved. Since many broadcasters don't have the time and resources to build and manage their own website, CLS is built as a hub for your personal achievements and a community management tool for our VIP members.
In order to officially verify your account and make edits after initial verification, you need to have at least a VIP level membership. That membership allows you to submit an Account Verification Request, which goes through a manual verification process with a real human, and cross-linking your accounts ahead of time can speed up the time to verify immensely.