Why You Shouldn't Connect Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts

Why You Shouldn't Connect Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts

Monday 30th June 2014

Everyone’s busy these days and we’re all looking for a few shortcuts to make our lives easier. I’m not saying all shortcuts are bad but there are some that you should really avoid. Twitter has made it deceptively easy to connect your Facebook account but don’t be fooled by this easy way out.

Twitter and Facebook are two very different networks with their own rules, etiquette, norms and people. Posting all your tweets on your Facebook wall might sound like a good idea (hey, now my friends will know EVERYTHING I’m doing) but guess what? No one wants to knows what’s going on with your Twitter life and vice versa.

Why you shouldn’t

Like I mentioned earlier, Facebook and Twitter are two distinct networks. The people you’re connected with on Twitter and Facebook expect two different things even if most of them are on the same networks.

Twitter is a high volume network. You can tweet 10-20 times a day and no one will care because it all flows through a timeline that moves quickly and rapidly. Think of Twitter as the information highway. You browse it while you’re waiting looking for the latest news update and it’s a platform that encourages you to follow lots of different people without permission and for that reason, it’s more a informal and loosely connected network.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a lot more personal. You send a friend request based on a connection you have with that person and upon acceptance that person is trusting you with their data and expecting you to be courteous with their time. The volume of updates is much less on Facebook vs Twitter based on the intimate nature of the relationship. On average, people expect maybe one or two updates from you at the max.

Considering the nature of both networks, if you were to combine the two, you run the risk of alienating your audience quickly. By posting your tweets on your Facebook profile and flooding their news feed, you will inundate you friends with status updates that make no sense and appear spammy. Those tweets you just shot out would flow perfectly within a Twitter timeline but for someone who has a few select friends on Facebook, they will immediately clutter up the news feed which might result in your profile being hidden, unfriending or worse, blocking.

The syntax of both networks is also different. Twitter relies in symbols like: # and @ which have no place in the Facebook world aside from the hashtag which is slowly gaining some momentum but rare. If you fill up your Facebook wall with RT’s mentions, and one sided replies, your audience will be confused and wondering who you’re talking to.

Why it’s bad for brands: I’ve seen several brands and unfortunately some social media companies take this approach. Their Twitter feeds are full of one sided Facebook posts and vice versa making us all wonder if they even exist anywhere within the social media world and which platform they’re actually on. The Twitter/Facebook auto connection is the quickest way to alienate your customers. What are the chances that you’ll actually log on and see what’s going with your Twitter feed and if anyone has connected with you? Facebook allows for 5,000 characters while Twitter cuts you off at a mere 140. If you write an extremely long Facebook post, Twitter will cut you off mid sentence and chances are, your Twitter audience won’t care to follow it back to your page to see what you said. Messages that are cut off by Twitter limitations make your business look sloppy and you will quickly be unfollowed. This hinders your progress to grow followers or make any progress on a social media site.

by Sukhraj Beasla, viralheat.com

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