Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages: Juggling the Do's, the Don'ts and the Where To's

Twitter and Facebook have made a lot of changes in the last several months. The changes they make are slowly making it easier for the average social networker to post to both sites at once. Since both sites are making similar arrangements, how do you decide where to post your original post? The following should help clear things up.

Twitter

I avoid using the online version for Twitter ever since the Twitter Profile bug came out. As far as I know it is still floating around out there in some form or another. Therefore, I use the 3^rd party software TweetDeck.

TweetDeck gives you the ability to post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. Just start a new post and click "Facebook" and your Twitter account and your post goes to both places at once. If you only want to post to Twitter, than you deselect "Facebook" and vice versa if you want to post to Facebook but not Twitter.

Now the thing with this is that it only posts to a Facebook Profile wall. For those of you who have Facebook Pages such as shop pages, fan pages etc., you cannot post directly to those from TweetDeck.

Facebook

On the other hand, if you post from Facebook, you can have that post also sent to Twitter by connecting either your Facebook Profile or your Facebook Page to your Twitter account.

Just logon to your Facebook Profile or Page and you should see an announcement at the top which prompts you to connect your Facebook to your Twitter account.

Being able to choose to connect either your Facebook Profile or your Facebook Page is very handy. I know many people keep their Facebook profile more for personal sharing and relationships and do not want to unnecessarily spam their intimate contacts who may or may not share the same interests as what is on the Facebook Page.

**Note to ETSY users: Etsy has a "connect to Facebook" option now, which is very nice, but take note that it goes to your Facebook Profile - NOT your Facebook Shop Page.

General Notes for both Twitter and Facebook

- Remember, if you're posting from Facebook to Twitter, keep your posts short or they will be cutoff in Twitter (I often type my post in TweetDeck because it tells me the character count as I type. Then I cut and paste it into Facebook)

- If you want a post RT'd (ReTweeted) don't use up all 140 characters for the post. Save space for "RT @yourname" in front of your post.

- When picking a URL shortener, stick with ones that allow previews such as bit.ly and tinyurl. (TweetDeck can preview those even if it is not set as a preview url - i.e. preview.tinyurl.com). From a tech perspective, a URL that goes straight to the site without a preview is dangerous. It makes it easy to perpetuate bad websites and broken links.

- In Facebook, when attaching links, it will pull up available images for you to pick as a thumbnail as well as the general description of the link - if it can find it. Yet another good reason why you should use links that can be previewed.

- When pasting posts into Facebook, if it already includes a link it will automatically kick in the Facebook "Attach Link" option. Very cool as it let's you preview the link location right away with no extra clicking or pasting.

- Both Twitter and Facebook offer the ability to post via a text message from your mobile phone (SMS). To post to both just send the single text message to both addresses!