Why NOT to Push Your Facebook Messages to Twitter

One thing I see often on social media are businesses pushing their Facebook statuses directly to Twitter.

You’d think that this would be a huge time saver – and it is. However, it is not something that I recommend.

Why?

Twitter has a character limit. When you push your Facebook status to Twitter, anything over Twitter’s character limit cuts off and puts a link to Facebook.

This results in a couple of different things.

The first is that Twitter posts that come directly through Facebook are rarely ever complete thoughts. Most of the time, they are partial thoughts with a … and a link, such as the example below.Or, sometimes just a link! (Also below)

The idea with this would be that if the reader wanted to read more, the would click on the “fb.me” link to read more.

However, most people who are on Twitter generally aren’t on Twitter so that they can click through to Facebook, read a status and THEN click on a link/see information. They just aren’t. People have short attention spans, and adding that step in doesn’t work very well.

It’s unlikely you will gain the credibility that you want/need with just reposts from Facebook. 

So what can you do instead?

In the same vein, programs like Hootsuite (my favorite) or Buffer offer similar convenience, but in a more appropriate way.

There are some experts that do recommend against using a scheduling program like Hootsuite. While there are definitely pros and cons to any sort of scheduling or automation, the pros have always outweighed the cons for me. You will have to explore this issue on your own to see what makes sense for your business.

My last piece of advice: if you don’t want to use Twitter, it’s okay! Many business owners think that they HAVE to be everywhere. I disagree – you shouldn’t be on any platform that you are not able to update consistently, as it can damage your credibility.

Ready to un-link Facebook from Twitter?  Click here to learn how to disable this feature.