After yesterday’s post, Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert, my friend Josh Husmann asked “Help me out! Why shouldn’t my twitter feed forward to Facebook?”
It’s a fair question, and it’s something I see a lot of people doing it. I even did it for a few weeks, until someone who wasn’t on Twitter told me to stop it. Here are six reasons you shouldn’t feed your Twitter stream into your Facebook stream.
- Most of your Facebook friends aren’t on Twitter. They don’t understand #hashtags and @replies. Your Twitter messages that contain those will just be confusing and/or boring.
- No one wants to read half a Twitter conversation, especially if they have no way of reading the other half.
- If you also automate your blog feed to Facebook, then your Facebook friends will get hit with two messages about new blog posts.
- If you’re trying to create an effective personal brand, then automating your feed will work against you. Take the time to write a custom message for both Twitter and Facebook.
- Facebook status updates can hold a whole lot more than a tweet. Why limit yourself to 140 characters on something that gives you a few hundred?
- Your Twitter audience is not necessarily your Facebook audience. Most of my Facebook network is made up of friends, family, people from high school and college, and people who live in the Indianapolis area. But they are not necessarily social media or PR people that I work with. A good number of my tweets are about business, social media, etc., and while I don’t mind sharing personal information with my Twitter stream, I don’t want to bother my personal stream with work information.
My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.
Photo credit: NathanGibbs (Flickr)
Erik,
I’m not sure I agree with you on this. I guess it all depends on your strategy.
First, I do automate tweets and Facebook posts. However, I do it so that I can space out my tweets throughout the day. I don’t feel this harms your branding. Big brands are doing this too.
That said, I do respond to each @Mention and DM.
Also, I don’t think there is overlap between both audiences so if I push something to Twitter and Facebook the
message isn’t duplicated.
I do agree that there is value in posting unique content to both places I just don’t think it has to be one or the other. Automate to do some of the heavy lifting then engage when you have time on each social media channel.
Great article! These are very good points. I had crossed over to auto-post to Facebook for one-post convenience (laziness). I’m off to update my settings now and separate my postings.
Thanks!
– Chris Sanchez
In general, I agree with the 6 reasons. However, I occasionally post the same message on both Twitter and Facebook — information posts, only, not conversations. Tweetdeck, and I’m sure other apps, make it easy to post to any one or all Twitter, Facebook, Buzz (I use it for saving links). I wish Tweetdeck interfaced with Google+ (not likely to happen).
Bob,
I don’t disagree with what you’re doing — I also post certain messages to Twitter AND Facebook at the same time. All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t tie everything in to Facebook and Twitter. There’s a new tool I’ve been given — and haven’t tried yet — called Argyle, that lets you post a message to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other tools, all from one interface. The idea is that you rewrite each message and repost it, but it all comes from that single interface. Also, it has some analytics functions, which will let you see where you’re getting the best results.
I totaly desagree, if you stream a user content feed is one point(and is of course is not good), so you must create a social profile with the intention of create good content relevant to people who wish to follow you in your blog and in your social network.
I agree completely with all of these! I am constantly amazed at the number of people who hold themselves up as social media experts but do this themselves. I am going to gently nudge each of them toward this post this week. :)
@Dave, I still do it too, but only occasionally. I think the difference is that you should not automatically feed your tweets into your Facebook stream. It’s okay to duplicate a message, like a new blog post, but not a constant barrage of tweets.
great points all around. I used to do that in the early days, but I got called out by a friend. I made the corrections. I still do it when I I think it is applicable but that is few and far between and I always remove the #’s
Dave
Thanks for the help and good advice!
I have a plugin which selectively posts tweets to facebook if it sees an #fb tag in the tweet. I think that is a good way to control what should go to facebook and what should not. Although, there is the disadvantage that all your twitter followers will be seeing a #fb at the end of the tweet… But I can live with that.
@Emer, that’s a good one. I never thought of that. I’ve even mentioned it in talks I’ve given, especially to college students, but never thought to include that here.
@Robby, I’m not as strict about over-messaging, but that’s only because I don’t check Facebook that often. If I see a duplicate message, it’s usually once in a great while. But you’re right about that being a problem, especially when you have a closely-tied network like many of the social media folks in Indianapolis. I’m connected with people like you, Lorraine, Doug, Kyle, and Kelly K on several properties. In fact, what’s funny is I always seem to be on Facebook when I see Doug’s tweets that I want to respond to, and on Twitter when they’re just regular tweets.
Reason #7: if we are friends in multiple places, your duplicated messages annoy me like an overplayed TV ad. This makes me want to hide/unfollow/defriend you.
Too bloomin’ right!
Also, don’t feed tweets into LinkedIn. It looks unprofessional, especially if someone looks you up and your last tweet was about your favourite flavour of yogurt.
It’s irritating to see the same post in three places at once if you’re connected to a person in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I use all three differently and I don’t expect to see exactly the same post in all, unless it’s relevant.
E.g. if I have a blog post, I tweet one version, update LinkedIn with a version without the hashtag, and post on Facebook filtering out anyone who’s a friend or a cousin or anyone else who couldn’t care less – and removing the hashtag.
Erik, this is great insight that hadn’t occurred to me. Good stuff. I’m new to your blog and am already a fan!
@bcampbellstudio
These are all excellent points, especially #1. It seems a lot of Facebook people are really dedicated to it and either aren’t on Twitter or don’t connect with/use it in the same way as FB. I’ve made the mistake of cross posting on both networks and had FB friends ask me what was up with the hashtags.
Coming up with original ways to promote on both networks forces you to be creative and find multiple ways to pitch your content. In my view that’s always a good thing.