Linking Your Facebook & Twitter Accounts?
Most of us have dabbled with what is and what isn’t possible and acceptable with all our social media channels to try and save time. Most of us also worked out fairly quickly that auto importing updates is stupid. Seriously, if you’re updating Facebook with your tweets or vise versa or even both, please please stop it now.
Why you ask?
- Because it’s stupid
- Your readers will think you are stupid
- Because it’s stupid
Tweeting to Facebook is a bad idea, here are 4 reasons why:
- #hashtags don’t work on Facebook (yet). They only work on Twitter, they are a twitter function, part of the twitter conversation and have no place (currently!) on Facebook.
- @mentions also don’t work on Facebook. This is mentioning a Twitter username so that 1: they get notified you mentioned them and 2: other users can follow them. We are not on Twitter though, so neither of those things works.
- We know you posted it from Twitter, it says so on your post! There are actually 3 mentions of Twitter in your post, the logo at the bottom, the link back to twitter and another one next to your name, which to save the name and shame I have blurred out.
- Facebook hates you. Facebook makes money from adverts running on Facebook, it wants you to visit Facebook so you click those ads and it makes money! In order to get you to do that, it gives less prominence to posts made from 3rd party applications, that means that less people will see your posts.
If you import the other way round, that is you send your Facebook updates to Twitter, that equally makes as little sense..
Importing your Facebook updates to Twitter is also a bad idea. Here are 3 reasons why:
1: The obvious one is Twitter only gives you 140 characters, when was the last time you checked your character count on Facebook? Never that’s when. Anything over 140 characters will simply not show in your tweet and cut off the end of your message.
2: Getting your notifications. Tracking conversations is an essential part of your social media communication. If you only ever login to Twitter or Tweetdeck or whatever your preference, how are you monitoring Facebook comments? Ok you can see the comments in Hootsuite for instance, but that means you would have to manually scan them constantly, not the way to go.
3: Your going to need to find and interact with other pages too, not just yours and you can’t do that from Hootsuite or any other 3rd party application (you can respond to pages you like, but won’t find new ones). In order to do this you need to login to Facebook, so there is no point importing updates when you have to login anyway and can do a better job using the Facebook platform.
So there are my top 7 reasons (and rants!) why not to link your Facebook and Twitter accounts and why not to auto update or import status’s and tweets!
’7 Reasons Why Not To Link Facebook and Twitter’ – TWEET THIS
If you made the mistake of linking your accounts but don’t know how to unlink them, here is how you do it.
- To stop Twitter posting to Facebook you’ll need to login to your account, click ‘settings – profile’ and you will be able to easily disconnect your account from there on the right hand side.
- To stop Facebook posting to Twitter just click this link www.facebook.com/twitter - This will show all your pages and what accounts are linked, just unlink them and that will stop your Facebook page posting to Twitter.
We all want to save time where we can, but this isn’t the place to do it.
Let me know what you think. Are you importing posts and sticking with it? Or do you have a any other tips on why it’s a bad idea, either way, let me know your thoughts below.. and of course, please share! :0)
Thanks! Have done this, as fed up with getting hacked in one and affecting the other!