There are lots of automated or semi-automated tools out there which, on the face of it, will help busy employees save time on the management of their social media accounts.
Some of them are genuinely helpful without impacting on the quality of a social media presence. Many aren’t.
Facebook, for example, offers the ability to take a feed directly from a Twitter account. Businesses who are new to social media (and some who aren’t!) gleefully head for the “connect with Twitter” button. At first glance, they think it’ll help to keep their page lively and active through the arrival of lots of fresh content, whilst saving them time on “real” postings.
If you’re considering this for your Facebook page, please just stop for one moment and give it some thought. If Facebook and Twitter were the same, you’d not be working on a presence on both of them, would you?
There are fundamental differences between the Facebook and Twitter environments. Twitter is great for short bursts of information, and lends itself well to quick, casual conversations. A Facebook post allows for more elaboration, and unlike a tweet, would very, very rarely be addressed to a single individual.
This is where the trouble starts with the autofeed. We see lots of businesses who are feeding Twitter directly to their facebook pages, using services which don’t allow users to distinguish between broadcast tweets such as:
“We’ve got a new menu coming out shortly and would love some feedback”
and conversational tweets like:
@mymate *giggles* Time for that third pint”
when syndicating them to Facebook.
So, your business’s Facebook page is going to start looking like this:
– not very inviting to those checking out your Wall to see if they want to hear from your business, is it?
But worse, think about what you’re doing to all those hard won Facebook Likers. Your Facebook posts show up in their News feeds, remember – that’s why you worked so hard to get them to Like your page in the first place.
So now, as a reward for Liking your page, your business is clogging up their Newsfeed with irrelevant and incomprehensible posts every time you have a conversation with someone on Twitter. Your Likers won’t have a clue what’s going on, and even if they did, chances are they wouldn’t be interested. You’re really asking for them to click that magic cross above your next post and banish your updates from their feeds forever.
If you really need to use a feed, there is at least one application available – Selective Twitter – which will allow you to only send Tweets with an additional hashtag to your Facebook page, so consider using that instead of the main Twitter applications.
What do you think? Do you link up your Twitter and Facebook accounts?
Hi there (again!) – you write some FANTASTIC blogs – love reading them
Talking about the “automated” Tweet thing – a few months’ back here in New Zealand we had a major earthquake in Christchurch. Tragically hundreds lost their lives and we’re still reeling from the emotional (and financial!) shock of those quakes (which are ongoing by the way)…
As you can imagine, not long after word of the first fatal quake hit the airways the Tweets appearing were naturally full of shock, empathy, the desire to help and concern, etc. And then every now and again were the automated Tweets (from some very known brands!) advertising their latest end-of-season specials. It “jarred” with everything else that was going on around it and was oh-so obvious that it those companies were virtually disconnected from what was going on in the virtual world. It “cost” them a lot of reputation building as a result. If they’d had those same Tweets automated to their FB page… well… I don’t even want to go there!
Smiles!
Julie@halobiz.co.nz
Awww Thanks Julie, we’re really glad you’re finding the blog interesting.
That’s a very good point about social media output suddenly becoming “out of sync” with big events – it’s possible too that the brands in question had pre-scheduled those tweets and then not realised how inappropriate they’d look after such a big change to sentiment. And as you say, the more platforms they’re syndicated too, the worse it gets…
Great Blog. I fell foul to autofeed when I started using Linked In and Twiiter and could see that people were getting annoyed. Now I am using these great tools to engage with people and have had some fantastic face to face meetings. I look forward to your next Blog.
Thanks Gary Murray
Thanks Gary, glad you’re enjoying the blog!
I agree! Some tweets can be FBed but not all. I find HootSuite (not selling it, just started using it and liking) is helping me because you can choose which places to cross-post. So I can tweet away happily as the chatty artist I am but only cross-post to FB and/or LinkedIn with more relevent items.
Very interesting – technology is a vehicle to assist communication? – ‘Phone’s and then answer machines – twitter and then automated tweets – maybe one of the reasons Skype is becoming so popular is because you do communicate directly with someone (until they invent a button to record……)? – hmmmmmmmmm (btw I always tweet personally at the time – very distracting though) – Louise (behind on my things to do)
Your tweets are always interesting and relevant, I learn such a lot from you guys that I am beginning to feel guilty about all this free info! When I make my first £100,000 you will be the first to be taken on to deal with my social media!
Thank you
Hi Tracey – no problem at all, we like to help out.
No need to feel guilty, if you tell a few friends in need where to come for help with their social media then that’s payment in karma! Oh and they don’t quite need to be making that sort of money, either 😉
Hi Rose,
I was using TweetAdder and having problems, so I signed up for tweetdeck, Hootsuite and MarketMeSuite all in the same week. Now my tweets are flooding my facebook page and I can’t remember where I switched the option on. I think Hootsuite is the culprit, but can’t find the option to switch it off. Any ideas?
JJ
It’s unlikely that Hootsuite is to blame, unless you’re deliberately scheduling your tweets to go out onto Facebook each time. Easiest way to stop this is revoke access to your Twitter account for all of the apps – go into Settings > Applications and remove everything, and then reauthorise your account with just Hootsuite or whichever app you want to use in future.
best – Kate