For some time, Twitter users have been able to publish their Twitter updates automatically to Facebook. Now, Facebook is returning the favor. On August 20, Facebook announced a new feature allowing Facebook Pages to automatically feed status updates, photos, links, notes and events to Twitter.
If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide
whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also
will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates,
links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple
Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to
different Twitter accounts.
Note that there's just one small catch. Only a Facebook Page can post updates to Twitter, not an individual user's personal Profile — not yet, at any rate.
But with all the changes coming down the
pipes from Facebook these days (including the launch of Facebook Connect and Facebook’s recent purchase
of FriendFeed), who knows? We shouldn’t be too surprised to see the ability to link Facebook and Twitter extended to include personal Facebook accounts as well, in time, if the spam load doesn't get too heavy.
Meanwhile, as more and more small nonprofits are taking advantage of both the new-and-improved Facebook Pages and the quick-hit power of Twitter, making one update do for both platforms could prove a small but meaningful time-saver.
How To Publish Your Facebook Page to Twitter
Setting up to link a Facebook Page to a Twitter account is quick and easy — it'll take you less than 1 minute.
To get started,visit http://www.facebook.com/twitter.
(If you’ve linked one or more Facebook Pages to Twitter, this is also
the URL you’ll return to whenever you want to unlink a Page or change
its settings for sharing information.)
You’ll be asked to grant Facebook access to your Twitter
account. This is necessary in order for your updates to be published,
and the permission can be revoked at any time by way of your Twitter
account settings.
Once you allow access, the accounts are linked.
Now, all you have to
do is select the checkboxes for the types of Facebook content you’d
like to post to Twitter — status updates, photos, links, notes, and
events.
And that's all there is to it.
In social media, remember, quite often “less is more” — so if your Facebook Page is very frequently updated, you'll want to give careful consideration to what and
how much information to share with your Twitter followers, who are used to quick 140-character
bites. I’d suggest that you keep a close monitor on your Twitter
stream for the automatic Facebook updates, too, for a while, until you
get a sense of what kind of updates will “translate” best to Twitter
and how your Twitter followers are responding to the Facebook feed.
Have you had a change to try publishing your Facebook Page to Twitter yet?
If so,
what’s your experience been like — and what feedback are you getting from your followers?