Unless you’re a social media superstar, it’s a bit hard to get feedback on Twitter questions. However, I got just a bit of response to a statement this morning asking people to not link their Twitter activity to their Facebook status. Kim Patrick Kobza of Neighborhood America agreed, but a few people were confused. Yesterday, one Twitter friend took the suggestion but then reversed when several of her Facebook friends bemoaned the loss of her frequent updates there.
What do you think? Is it a good social media practice to link your activity on these two platforms?
As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I am a high-volume user. Nice thing is, there are plenty of people who use Twitter as frequently as I do, and for anyone following more than a 100 people, even my pace usually isn’t enough to flood their updates screen. But Facebook is a totally different animal. Before I really got going on Twitter, I updated my Facebook all the time. I got lots of comments, even a “you’re your own reality show.” But is that what Facebook is for? (And I don’t think that was quite a complement.) As I listened, I learned that real friends were downgrading me in their news feed.
Because on Facebook, almost nobody updates like a high-volume Twitter user. That is, unless you are linking your statuses.
If you are, you may be besieging your Facebook friends with goobledygook like “RT @jobloe virtual assistants do the work so you can do the play http://www.crazymarketing.wordpress.com” (OK, I made that up, because the real stuff is almost as bad and I didn’t want to single out any of my contacts.) Most of your Facebook friends don’t get it, and they don’t want it. And if they are on Twitter, they are already getting it and don’t want to get it twice.
And, a technical issue: while some programs only show the latest update in a Facebook feed, some show all of them, so while you are Twittering away you are literally flooding out all your friends’ other friends.
I linked my statuses for a while. Politely, my friend Ari Herzog pointed out that maybe I wasn’t doing what my Facebook friends wanted. And like my above-mentioned Twitter friend, I tried a little experiment. I asked my Facebook friends to follow me on Twitter if they wanted more than a few updates a day. One did.
How many of your friends would follow you from Facebook to Twitter?
Last words: Any way you answer that question, you shouldn’t be linking your statuses. Tell me why I’m wrong (or agree with me) in the comments.
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16 responses to “If You Link Your Statuses, Will Your Friends Still Love You?”
man, you hate the linking! I tried to sign up for it a few weeks ago but now I think I’m in your camp. I don’t like it b/c inevitably you see facebook status messages that look like they belong in Twitter and NOT in facebook.
Also, the more I play around with Twitter, the more I feel that Twitter and Facebook are TOTALLY different. With the exception of you, almost all of the people I follow on Twitter and who follow me are people I didn’t know prior to joining Twitter. And I like it that way — I’m meeting new and interesting people in new areas! It’s great networking, whereas Facebook is more reconnecting with old friends.
I’m sure my frequent Twitter updates annoy some facebook people, but I’m pretty sure Facebook allows you to control how much content you see from specific people — that is, if someone doesn’t want to see so many updates from me, they can make the adjustment. At least, that’s how it used to work. I haven’t checked in some time. I have Twitter populating my statuses (stati?) on four or five other social networks and web sites. I like it, and so far, nobody has complained to me.
Brandon, while there is a setting in your Facebook news feed to increase or decrease a person’s traffic, it’s all or none; you can’t choose to remove updates pinged from Twitter. That would be my ideal, just like I can hide Twitter updates in FriendFeed.
The problem I have is I don’t WANT to see people’s tweets anywhere but Twitter and its clients and search systems. Once they show up on other social networks–with the noise it creates–I am turned off.
I’m not sure I buy it. I use twitter to talk to my network, whether they’re close friends or loose ties (like the random folks who show up on my follow list). I like being able to reach out to everyone.
Now, I’m not a heavy user, and so that might be a distinction. I try to keep things to between 3 and 5 updates a day. I also try and keep the facebook convention of ‘David is…’ in mind when I tweet, so things don’t look weird on my FB page.
Anyway, I’m quite new to twitter so my views my change. But for now I like to be able to talk to my network, and linking FB and twitter does just that.
I have seriously thought about the distinct audiences over the past couple of weeks.
My personal choice is to use both Twitter & Facebook for a blend of personal & professional topics. I try to keep my updates to stuff that people might really care about…so I don’t think that I am inundating my Facebook followers yet.
Personally, I would love to see more updates from my Facebook friends. A lot of people still have accounts…but don’t really *use* either application.
Also, when I go into either Twitter or FB… I’m glancing at a moment in time. I love all of my tweeps & friends, but I don’t have time to read every post. I check in… scan to see if there is something interesting going on… reply and check back later. I’m assuming that most people are on the wavelength… Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Perhaps as my lists (or digital addiction) grow, I will need to separate my updates. Right now the convenience of one-source updates outweighs the potential to over tweet my FB friends.
To my FB followers… I apologize if you see the occasional “@so-and-so right on!” tweet and it makes no sense at all 😉
I am new to using Facebook and Twitter. I thought it was cool I could update Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Adriel politely asked that I not do that, so I stopped.
I do have Twitter feeds on my blog in the side panel. I figure people can go and look at them if they like. I also have my Twitter feeds on several Squido pages. They only see the feeds, if they go to the site.
Here is a link to my blog, so you can see what I mean about the feeds showing up in the column. They don’t update the RSS feed.
http://stinginvestigations.typepad.com/sting_investigations_priv/
If your friends on facebook and twitter are different than yes don’t import your twitter feed into facebook, it’s way too confusing and it fills up your wall really quick.
But I do know people who have the same friends on facebook and twitter so it works great for them.
What I would like to figure out is how to get my facebook status imported into my twitter without my twitter updates being shoved into facebook.
Thanks for the post. It’s so funny, since I was just struggling about this very topic twitter/fb status over the past week or two.
I had been updating my FB status with my tweets. This was usually 1-3 times a day–except during the debates when I was wildly tweeting. I did hold back on some tweeting to avoid a status change overload and the concomitant friend dismay.
Then, when I started feeding my blog to twitter, I KNEW many of my fb friends would be “politely” disinterested. BUT i didn’t want to post my status stuff to both. (Lazy, I know, but we are using technology, it must be easier.)
So my solution? Since I post alot more to twitter, and much more on my professional interests, I use twitterfeed to feed my FB status to twitter to help keep my tweets personal. And keep the noise in one room. That’s already noisy.
This really begs the question about the convergence between all of our worlds. Our work friends, our colleagues, our professional acquaintances, our drinking buddies, and our loved ones. Still working on that. Any sociologists out there??
@Gwynne – Thank you! You have answered the question that many of us have – how can we send our infrequent and polite Facebook updates to Twitter (remember everyone, this will be totally public)! I’m doing it now, using http://twitterfeed.com and this helpful guide: http://blogs.msdn.com/beaudreaux/archive/2008/11/30/how-to-send-your-facebook-status-updates-to-twitter-as-an-rss-feed.aspx
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That’s my current feeling…i had them linked for one day and it was bad news…still not sure if I entirely unlinked them. But I’m also lazy and wanted to have some updates appear on both, so perhaps twitterfeed. Thanks for a good discussion on the topic.
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Just an anecdotal reason for not sending Twitter updates to Facebook….
I made a comment on Twitter that I was being followed by someone, and the comment updated my Facebook status. Some of my Facebook Friends, apparently not familiar with the concept of “following” on Twitter, got worried & wanted me to call the police! It was an honest mistake, but definitely an argument for not linking the two. I haven’t unlinked them yet (although I probably should), but I’m very conscious now of how anything I say on Twitter may appear to someone who only knows me on Facebook.
Great questions about the linking of statuses. The platforms are completely different in their use and the bleed over from recently befriended twitterers drowns out friends who do not frequently update their status on Face Book. I rarely update my status there in comparison to twitter and I think I prefer the separate streams I don’t mind the occasional twitter duplicate like for a new blog post. However the linked stream really is a bad idea in my opinion.
I think this comes down to personal preference, how your divide you content by each channel, and how well you know your audience.
For me, I have a collection of friends on Facebook who don’t use Twitter, and a collection of Twitterpeeps that I also follow on Facebook. While Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed may be overload for some of the major geeks, I find I get maximum participation by linking my statuses.
Again, personal…not black and white.
One thing I have done though is get more focused in my communications (less about cute things my dogs do, more about gov2.0).
It’s all a playground for me. Maybe people unfollow me because of it, but I’m not super numbers obsessed. I am more concerned with communicating, venting, and fleshing out ideas over time.
Good discussion though 🙂