Why Linking Facebook to Twitter is generally a bad idea

Is it good practice to link social media accounts?

Typically I would say linking social media accounts is a BAD idea, however the more involved I get in social media and online communication for business, the more I am realizing:

There are no right or wrong ways to use social media, just effective and ineffective ways of using it. Your success is directly related to your ability to communicate and set expectations for your network.

Each social media platform has a unique culture and each person has their own unique interpretation on that culture. You should make strategic decisions based on a deep understanding of the best practices on a certain platform instead of what saves you the most time.

The only reason to publish your Facebook posts on your Twitter timeline is to save time. In doing so, you are telling your audience that saving time is more important than engaging with them.

Anyone who has invested any amount of time on twitter, uses it for real discussion and actively engages with the community on twitter, knows that twitter is nothing like Facebook. There are very few similarities in the way you frame a message on Facebook compared to Twitter.

Social media is about engaging the community, being a part of a discussion, spending time investing in your network. It is not about broadcasting your message, bombarding people with your agenda or duplicating a message across multiple platforms to save time.

So, as it relates to typical everyday usage, it is best to avoid linking your Facebook account to your Twitter stream, the messages are different, your audience is different, the platforms are different. Best case scenario, you will be ignored, worst case scenario you will alienate or offend your audience…

With all that said, I do believe there is an appropriate way to go about this. But again, you have to be crystal clear in setting expectations.

Understanding social media for business is about understanding the unique culture of each platform and communicating accordingly.

Twitter Culture

The general assumption on twitter is that if you have an account, you are actively responding to tweets and are present in a conversation. If you send out a tweet, you better be monitoring your timeline and be ready to respond to anyone who engages you on the content. Failure to do so will result in people thinking less of you.

However if you clearly state in your twitter bio what type of material you will be tweeting, it will allow potential followers to evaluate whether or not the want to consume your content.

It is all about expectations.

If I expect you will be engaging with me (the default culture on twitter) and all you tweet is crap from your Facebook page, I will most likely unfollow you. However if you clearly outline how you use your twitter account in your bio and I choose to follow you because I find value in consuming your information without conversation, then we are all good.

For example, this method of scheduled auto-tweets or Facebook tweet linking could be valuable to a restaurant or coffee house who wants to posts their daily special on Facebook and quickly relay that information to twitter.

So an example bio here might look like:

HouseBlend CoffeeHouse, we tweet our daily specials and pictures of our delicious food. Account not monitored, however consider connecting with us on Facebook…

So how do you know if you should link your Facebook account to your Twitter account or use any type of automation for that matter?

Litmus Test

Ask yourself:

• Do I understand the culture of the platform I am communicating on?
• Am I able to make informed decisions about the social promotion of my business by properly framing the content I will share?
• Am I defining expectations for my audience in a way that clearly identifies how I operate my social media account?

or

• Did you hear that Twitter was good for business so you should probably be there, you have no idea how to use it, but some guru somewhere said once that maybe you should probably link your Facebook to Twitter and open a LinkedIn account, but you don’t really have time to actually talk with people, so you are just gonna hook up everything all to one account so that you can reach the most amount of people possible with the least amount of work?

People don’t care about you until you prove you care about them!

Chances are 99% of the time, actually showing you care for people means engaging with them rather than auto generating content to save some time in your precious little day. <<< Tone Implied.

Please consider leaving comments in any of the annotations on the side of this post, I would love to hear your feedback!