How to Connect Your Twitter and Facebook Account, and Vice Versa (and Why You Should Reconsider This)

Let us assume you’ve listened to our advice and started your blog. It might be fun, engaging, and well written; you publish new posts all the time, but you don’t seem to be getting many visitors at all?

Let’s look at the average Joe on the Internet these days. 

Joe is often online, surely every day. He reads his email, checks Facebook profile, Twitter and Instagram accounts. Maybe he even regularly goes trough some news’ website and watches videos on YouTube. However, Joe has no idea that your blog exists. At most, he might stumble upon your link somewhere, but Joe is not about to type it into the search bar – Joe is lazy. He might click on it if he saw it and it seemed fun enough, but where is Joe going to see that your blog is up and that you have a great new post each time you publish it? 

Think – where does Joe spend most of his time online? That’s where you need to be!

In case it wasn’t clear enough – you need to be present on social media platforms to best connect with your fans. And when we say social media we namely mean Twitter and Facebook – most of the people have both of them.

The Good “Old” Days of Cross-posting

Back in 2013, when we first wrote about cross-posting, it was a fantastic idea to connect your two profiles and make things a bit easier. Your updates on one social network would simultaneously appear on the other and juggling your blog and two networks was extremely simple. 

However, a lot has changed in the game of personal branding since then, and connecting your social media accounts doesn’t seem to be just the right thing to do in 2019. You might still have some doubts about why is that, so we decided to tell you more about why connecting Facebook and Twitter is not such a great idea anymore. 

Plus, bear in mind that automatically cross-posting your tweets to Facebook is no longer possible, but we’ll get there in a moment.

Why you should NOT connect Facebook and Twitter

Even though taking care of posts with one click on both networks seems appealing, automation, in this case, can damage your brand. Here are a few reasons why…

1. It Can Look Spammy and Amateurish

If you linked your Facebook account to your Twitter account, your feed will end up looking like a ninja walked through it with a katana. You don’t see the emoticons, you get cut off sentences and links, etc.

This just leaves an impression that you don’t actually know what you’re doing and you risk being considered as a spammy user yourself. And you wouldn’t want your awesome post, the one you put so much time and effort into creating, to appear as spam now, would you?

Okay, if you have super-engaged followers and fans, you might just get away with it – by the skin of your teeth. 

BUT!

An important part of your social media campaign is to encourage people to follow your brand across all the channels. The only way to achieve that is by offering valuable content on each one, which brings us to our next point:

2. The Two Platforms Have Different Audiences and Purposes

Facebook and Twitter cater to different target audiences. The talks on each of the two platforms differ, and the type of content shared and released there is different as well. 

In general, Facebook helps people connect with their family and friends. Facebook users share updates on their lives, as well as photos and videos. The stats from a recent social media fact sheet on the number of Facebook users in the US show that:

• close to 70% of American adults use the platform,
• over 80% of Facebook users belong to the 18 to 29 age group, and
• 65% of people ages 50 and up use Facebook as well.

On the other hand, people use Twitter to share real-time news, information, and personal ideas, and to connect with people from a wider, global community. The numbers from the same fact sheet tell us that:

• Twitter is used by 24% of adults in the US; 
• users aged 18-29 represent 40% of the total number, and
• less than 20% of people ages 50 and up use Twitter. 

Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to share identical messages across the two platforms – it would limit your reach and results. 

We know that business owners have a lot on their plate, but going that extra mile and tailoring the messages you share with your audience will be well worth it.

3. The Way of Writing is Different

Facebook is a more in-depth kind of platform where your brand has a chance to engage more with your audience. Think of a Facebook post as a full-length discussion, while Twitter, with its 280-character long tweets, is more appropriate for fast-paced communities who like seeing on-the-point, digestible tips and news. 

This means that you have to know the posting structure and rules for both networks such as:

• The type of content that works, 
• Number of characters, 
• Hashtags for your content on Twitter.

Pro tip: Make sure you have all the right username handles for each platform so that you can easily tag people, business partners, and others who are connected with your brand in your post/tweet.

4. Oversharing Content

Oversharing is considered a serious problem on social media. If you post too many pieces of content or share the same type of content over and over again, you run the risk of annoying people. And imagine the extent of the damage if you were cross-posting that very same content across other social media! 

Remember: Quality over quantity – always.

Your content needs to provide value to your audience and not just revolve around promotion. For instance, by answering a question related to your niche, you will be perceived as an industry leader and increase the audience engagement rate.

You can find out more about some of the best practices on how to use the most popular social networks today to grow your (business) brand in one of our posts.

5. Connecting Your Twitter Account with Facebook is NOT possible

As we mentioned earlier, this is no longer an option. 

It used to be, though, and the process was the following:

Step 1. Going to your Twitter page and clicking on Settings. 

Step 2. On your left-hand side, you would choose the category “Apps and devices“.

Step 3. At the top of the page, a blue “Connect to Facebook“  button was situated and when you clicked on it, a window would appear asking you to grant some permissions if you want to link the two accounts and, 

Step 4. After clicking “Okay“ a few times, you were all set.

However, as of August 2018, this is how things look like when you get to Step 3:

When you click on Learn more, you get to Twitter’s Help Centre where you can see this important update:

Twitter attributed the change to a Facebook update which states that apps that had been given permission to publish posts to Facebook as the logged-in users no longer have that possibility. Instead, you need to do it manually by using the Copy link to Tweet feature.

Although some might consider this to be a downgrade, it’s really a blessing in disguise for those who care about their brand’s online reputation, as we pointed out earlier.

So, what’s it going to be then?

Whether you decide to create custom content for each social media platform (the way to go!) or just manually copy tweets and post them on Facebook is totally up to you. We at .ME all about helping you grow your brand, which is why we took it upon us to advise you on why some practices, though once good, are meant to stay in the past. 

Weigh the pros and cons carefully and decide – is this something you really want to do, or are you going to set aside a bit more of your time to devise two different strategies for each of the two platforms.