Facebook isn’t sitting still with their 300 million + members. Lately they have been rolling out some cool new features that you need to be aware of.
A little time-saving feature they recently added is the ability to post content on my Fan Page that automatically posts over to Twitter with a link that directs my followers back to my Fan Page!
Pretty cool, huh?
“Why is that cool?” you ask?
Because with Facebook Fan Page Status Updates you get more than twice the space (a humongous 340 characters) to pontificate.
“But isn’t that too much for Twitter?” you ask again. (Man oh man I have some smart readers!)
Twitter will truncate / chop off / shorten your Facebook Update to about 120 characters and then – CHECK THIS OUT – insert a bit.ly link back to your Fan Page. (More on bit.ly in another post.)
If you compose your update carefully you can leave a sort of “cliffhanger” that cuts off your Update mid-sentence, thereby “tweaking” (in a good sense) your Twitter followers into clicking through to your Fan Page to read “the rest of the story.” While they’re there they might as well become a Fan, shouldn’t they?
So here is what you do: follow this link to http://facebook.com/twitter and connect your Twitter profile with your Facebook Fan Page. Edit the settings to your liking (I have checked Updates, Photos, Videos and Links but not Notes because I’m importing my blog posts from The Sales Whisperer® into my Facebook Fan Page for The Sales Whisperer® and I don’t want duplicates popping up on Twitter when I Tweet about my new posts.)
If you’re also updating your Facebook personal profile and/or Fan Page with the Selective Twitter Updates app, you should disable the Fan Page Update feature because you’ll end up with duplicating your Tweets! (Been there. Spammed my friends. Got the T-shirt and the FACEBOOK SPANKINGS to prove it! Doh!)
Now, here’s the money shot to synchronize your social media updating: Get a Hootsuite.com account and tie it to a Ping.fm account but don’t have your Ping.fm account update your main Twitter account because you’ll have Hootsuite update your Twitter account.
Hootsuite will also update your Ping.fm account. Your Ping.fm account will serve as the mac-daddy updater that goes to your Facebook Fan Page, your Facebook Profile, your LinkedIn Status and up to three blogs! Not to mention Digg, Delicious, Plaxo, MySpace, Flickr, Typepad and a host of other sites.
And if that’s not enough, Hootsuite allows you to schedule your updates so you can preload them and go about your business and your life while keeping your peeps informed! How’s that for SHAZAAM?!
I hope I didn’t confuse you but if you think it’s hard reading this try building it out and writing about it!
If I did then don’t be afraid to pick up the phone or shoot me an email and we’ll get ya squared away. Promise!
