Automating Your Status
Are you one of those people who has migrated to twitter after being active on Facebook? If you are then there is a strong possibility that you have automated your Twitter account to update your Facebook profile.
Before the recent Facebook changes this was a powerful strategy to use, It gave you an active presence on two social media platforms. In the old Facebook design the newsfeed was filtered and your status updates were kept in a separate tabs and were visible to those who were looking for them
A Change In Strategy Is Needed
The new site design means that the rules have fundamentally changed. I want to highlight the dangers for those twitter users who are either high volume tweeters or who are using RSS feeds or automated services to populate their twitter stream and syndicate it to Facebook
Twitter Syndication
I have many friends who now spend all their time on Twitter and send their twitter feed direct to their Facebook Profile. In the old Facebook design the newsfeed was filtered and your status updates were kept in a separate tab. Now everything is merged and shared in real time to everyone in your network
Has Facebook Given You Total Control?
By using friend lists to filter your feed you can tailor your news quite precisely. The newsfeed is both personal and public. Your status updates and Facebook activties are broadcast to your whole network
The danger comes when you overexpose yourself. By this I mean publishing too many updates so you dominate the real estate on your friends profiles.
Overwhelmed By Links
A few days ago I was observing this phenomenon from several people in my network. My page was overwhelmed by the sheer number of links they were posting. I realized that they probably didn’t even know this was occurring; It looked like they had set their accounts to run on autopilot.
Are You Shooting Yourself In The Foot?
This is almost certainly damaging to their reputation. Personally I would hate to be thought of as a spammer, it’s frightening to think that such a simple change in design can have such huge immplications
What is even more relevant is that Facebook now gives every user the option to hide someone who become annoying. They make it very easy. One click and you are gone, banished to the little box at the bottom of the newsfeed
The people I observed are all social media marketers. Their business depends on people listening to their messages. If the message is not getting through because they have alienated their audience then they are effectively shooting themselves in the foot. They are burning out their friends much the same way email marketers can burn out their lists by constant messaging.
Possible Solutions
I would like to offer a few suggestions to this situation and urge you to rethink your strategy if you find that you are seeing yourself in the mirror.
Ask yourself how your status updates will look from your friends perspectives, do you really want to look like an automated robot?
Take a few minutes to examine your own Facebook newsfeed; Can you see other friends making this same mistake?
If you overexpose yourself people will hide you from their newsfeed and you will never even know
How can you strike a delicate balance between keeping visible and annoying people?
If you are syndicating your status updates from Twitter to Facebook consider using Twirl and PingFM, you can carefully select which tweets to send to your Facebook Status and then turn syndication on and off as needed.
A River Or A Flood
With great power comes great responsibility. Facebook and Twitter are not the same and while on Twitter your tweets might be flowing into a great river of mass communication , over on Facebook you a sending them down lots of narrow pipes and some people don’t like to get their houses flooded.
There are obviosusly some people who this doesn’t apply to, some high volume tweeters send a constant stream of gold. Even If they get to be too imposing on your newsfeed you can always bunch a few together in their own special list.
Feedback and Discussion
I would love to hear your feedback on this issue. I have Facebook Connect installed so if you are reading this on my blog you can sign in and leave a comment, it will automatically post a link to your profile so your friends can read this article too.
If you are reading this on Facebook let me know what your experience has been. A change in design will always take some adjusting to and only through discussion can we define possible solutions and best practices.
Ian David Chapman
I’ve watched people use Twitter to game the search engine system by tweeting several times in a row a worthless link to their website. That I would consider spam.
Usually in the mornings I share links to blogs I subscribe to, hoping to be a resource. I think that works well for syndicating twitter to FB, but I do know that if one tweets a lot during the day, it’s annoying to those who follow them on FB.
I guess you need to decide for yourself where you fall in those two scenarios. I love your suggestion about using ping.fm to control where your updates go. I may have to reconsider twitter to FB.
I was on FB well before I joined twitter. In the beginning I had just 2 or 3 friends who were on twitter and even then I found that their status was updated too frequently and I`d miss out on seeing my other friends updates.
Then when my twitter friend numbers grew on FB (old layout) it was too much for me and I just took them off my main feed (instead, once a day I`d check up on them in the live feed)
Now with the new layout it`s annoying that I have to see everyone`s quizzes, polls, book recs etc and the only way to get rid of that is to `hide` these friends – but I am still interested in their status updates so that wld mean not getting any info at all.
Having said that, I`m sorry to say I still have a lot of twitter friends on `hide` because I just can`t deal with the info overload in the new setup. The old feeds worked much better for this reason and I felt I had more control over my feeds then, than I do now..
ps: I`ve got almost 500 FB friends and I`ve never linked my twitter-FB profile cos at least 400 of them wld hate it! Just trying to maintain connections with `real life friends` as well as my new twitter friends..
Thanks for the heads up on this. I also automated my tweets to go to FB.
I’ll definitely hyave to take a squizz and make some changes. Thanks.
Thanks Ian,
Your info is spot on, as someone new to both and looking for different uses and connections I have decided to keep both feed separate. Saying this if we can choose the posts this would be a great tool and advantage. Will check it out if to see if it I can figure it out. Not being very tech savvy inclined to struggle at times
With Love for I Love You
Ian Stone – Metaphysician & Founder of HEART Energy Healing System,
Human Energy Assessment Release Treatments
Metaphysical Institute
Metaphysical Institute Blog
Facebook Add as a friend
Aloha,
This was very a very helpful article. Am new to twitter (9 days) and at first thought I’d connect it with FB. Quickly realized that twitter is a different crowd from my FB. . .and at a way different pace. lol
FB is mostly people from my past and it’s great to connect with them. Twitter is what’s happening Now and the creation of new connections. Very interesting phenomenon.
Ian,
Thank you for the warning.
I set up Twitter updates to FB through FriendConnect(?) long time ago and haven’t paid much attention. I actually don’t tweet a lot, so maybe it isn’t a problem.
However, I HAVE noticed certain people dominating twitter updates and frankly, I still don’t “get” twitter in that what those folks are doing are not what I want to do – pumping links and harvesting followers.
I enjoy and will be following your blogs because you are in touch with what’s happening and it’s very helpful to have you digest the info first and present it in a more layman’s version.
Thanks Ian. I find your writings always offer a lot of value.
-addy
I had read this earlier today so I was thinking about the FB cross-posting issue while writing a tweet and it occurred to me that @reply tweets did not show up in my FB stream. So I started the tweet with my own nick, but thought, ‘That looks weird self replying’ so I thought I would declare what I was doing and set it to @noFB.
After sending, I thought I should check who, if anyone I had just replied to and look what I found:
http://twitter.com/noFB
I sync. I’m careful with my posts to both. My twitter posts definitely get a lot more attention on FB, but you are completely right with oversaturation. I force myself to hold back on twitter because I want at least 4-24 hours between posts to get maximum response on FB (and not to ‘blog’ down friends and followers).
Of course, like all of us, there are days where I feel ignored – and I’m not exactly competing in the ‘follower’ race on twitter.
http://www.twitter.com/anandbhatt
Hey Ian, Thanks for another great tip. I see too many un-intentional marketers being a little over aggressive.
I have a question, how man FB posts from twitter is too much in your mind? I try to have 8 tweets / day that do go to FB. Most seems to like them.
Any thoughts?
You have a choice so, make it a better than terrific day!
Terry
On Twitter the most succesful Tweeters post an average of 24 tweets a day. On Facebook that can be a bit too much, 8 tweets is probably a good number to work from. I would also consider what time of day you choose to post them . There are definite peak periods during the day when more people are using Facebook. It depends what time zone you are in. In my own experience between 7-9am EST 12-1pm EST 5-7pm EST and then 10-11pm EST are the best times to Tweet into Faebook. It all depends on what timezone you are in and where your friends/followers are located
I know the twitter/friendfeed/plaxo updates are out of control. Thank you for the insight.
Warmly,
Morana
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Yep, that would explain why i have had to delete 4 – 5 peeps from my list – all of a sudden it was like tweet armaggedon – take cover! Like to hear from people with something good to say, but it was getting ridiculous – now understand why. Great work….
Yep, that would explain why i have had to delete 4 – 5 peeps from my list – all of a sudden it was like tweet armaggedon – take cover! Like to hear from people with something good to say, but it was getting ridiculous – now understand why. Great work….