Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Why You Shouldn’t Link Your Facebook + Twitter Posts Together

Why You Shouldn't Link Facebook + Twitter Posts Together

Last week, I was knee deep in Pinterest “research” for my blog…

How To Get Blog Famous

Alright, so maybe I wasn’t quite that desperate (I am!), but I’m always looking for ways to improve my blog and internet presence (whatever that means!).  In my “research”, I came across roughly a million helpful tips that I tried to do immediately. But, that’s a story for another day.  This post is about one tip that I will absolutely NOT follow:

Linking Facebook & Twitter together.

For those of you out there who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. Linking Facebook & Twitter together is a thing you can do to streamline your social media.  For me & my blog, that means every time I post something to my Facebook page, my Twitter will automatically post the same thing.  For a while, I had it set up that way and didn’t have to run all over social media syncing up my stuff.  That was cool…for a while.

The problem with linking up Facebook & Twitter is that some things get lost in translation & it looks ridiculous.

Here’s what I’m talking about…

 

An example of Facebook + Twitter Linked Together

Notice the annoying “data:blog.metaDescription” thing underneath my link?  That was because my old layout (& my new one to an extent) didn’t provide the description of my post when it made the link.  I just fixed it when I posted it to Facebook to say whatever I wanted, but when it automatically posted to Twitter, it looked like that.  Ridiculous.

Also, the picture?  On Facebook, it looked fantastic.  On Twitter, it was cropped into a tiny square and you couldn’t even see it, let alone read any text that was on there.  Totally unprofessional looking.

Now let’s look at the bottom tweet about the iced coffee?  On Facebook, it actually had a picture of an iced coffee.  On Twitter, not so much.  And who’s got time to click on that link?  Nobody, that’s who.  I wanted a picture, not a link.

Because of those annoyances, I decided to unlink Facebook & Twitter.  Oh, the horror!  Not really.  Even though I now have to actually go over to Twitter to post my links, at least I have control over what you see.  I can post a link to my blog with pictures that you can actually see.  I can also choose a few different pictures to include instead of just having one.  Sure, it’s an extra step, but it allows me more control of my social media.  Sometimes automating everything isn’t the best option.  In this case, it totally wasn’t for me.

Now, I’ve only linked my blog Facebook page with Twitter, but the same could be said for personal Facebook pages.  Every time you post a photo or a status that’s above 140 characters (Twitter’s limit)?  You get the little fb.me link.  It’s not cool at all.  You want your people to see what’s going on instead of clicking a link. 

Honestly, it doesn’t take that long to post things individually. If it’s such a time suck, you could always use a scheduler.  There’s about a million of those out there.  Right now, my favorite is Hootsuite.  I also love scheduling posts on Facebook. ‘'

What are your thoughts on linking profiles together?  I had terrible luck with putting mine together, but I’m sure there are a ton of success stories out there.  I would love to hear them!

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