I need to make better use of Facebook.
When I started using Facebook almost four years ago, I understood the basic idea: connecting and reconnecting with friends. I enjoyed some of that right away, finding an old college friend I hadn’t seen or heard from in years and staying in better touch with lots of other friends.
But I didn’t understand other things: For instance, I found it annoying when a friend wanted to compare favorite movies. I didn’t want to annoy the friend by not playing, but I didn’t really care to find out if I was “soulmates” with a casual friend (as one game suggested about a friend with similar favorite movies). Somehow, I don’t think soulmate is defined as someone you drift out of touch with until a computer program finds the person.
As I was trying to figure out Facebook, I started using Twitter, which was even more confusing at first (fewer friends were using, and I didn’t understand the 140-character limit). But as I started to understand Twitter and use it more, it quickly soared past Facebook in my understanding, appreciation and use.
When I learned that a Facebook app would post most of my tweets to Facebook (not replies), I suddenly was able to become active on both platforms, without having to master social media multitasking.
I also became a Facebook over-user.
You can tweet a few dozen times a day and that’s fine. But no one likes when people update that often on Facebook. By the time I learned about that bit of social media etiquette, I already had some true friends hiding my updates. But other friends who weren’t on Twitter were responding frequently to me on Facebook. That was good, so I decided to let it ride. Just as we all tolerate some quirks of our real-life friends, I appreciated that some Facebook friends were tolerating my tweets and accepted that others were hiding them.
I let that ride too long.
I blogged about how annoying it is for people to auto-sync their Foursquare and Twitter accounts, so that every check-in or every mayorship becomes an automatic tweet. (I do selectively tweet sometimes from Foursquare, commenting on what I’m doing where I’m checking in.) I was right in that tweet, but I should have recognized then that my auto-syncing with Facebook and Twitter was just as annoying.
As social media director for Journal Register Co., I have been watching recent developments in Facebook and planning to blog for my JRC (and now MediaNews) colleagues about using Facebook effectively as a journalist. But first, I should clean up my act.
So I just un-synced my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I considered whether to keep them synced, but not automatic, but I know I’m not likely to remember very often to put #fb on tweets I want posting to Facebook. So I’m going to tweet when I should tweet and update when I should update. When I’m using Tweetdeck, I may selectively post to both accounts. But no more auto-posts of tweets on Facebook.
In my first few months at JRC, I have been focusing more on Twitter than on Facebook – partly because more journalists are using Facebook and largely because most journalists don’t recognize how valuable Twitter can be. But part of the reason was because I wasn’t using Facebook as well as I should be.
That’s going to stop now. I need to set an example for colleagues by cleaning up my bad habits and engaging more effectively on Facebook. I recently launched my Facebook journalist page. I’ve been posting most of my blog posts there, but I’ll try to post there a couple more times as well.
I’ll keep a mix of personal and professional content on my Facebook profile, too. Many of my friends there are journalists. And others, if they haven’t hid my updates by now, are either interested in or tolerant of updates about journalism. I frequently join the Facebook conversation, commenting on friends’ updates and “liking” some of their updates.
I probably will continue sharing more photos on Flickr than on Facebook, though I may share some photos both places. We’ll have to see how that develops. Flickr was the first social platform I used heavily and I like having my photos collected there.
I’ll be blogging soon about ways journalists can use Facebook to engage the community and improve their journalism. And I’ll do a better job of showing them.
I’m with you on not syncing Twitter and Facebook. And I so agree that Foursquare check-ins are uber annoying when them come across my feeds. For a very short time, I inadvertently had the share-with-Twitter button turned on on Foursquare, and I annoyed myself by seeing my checkin-ins in my feeds. Anyway, I think, too, that if you are going to share the same thing on both platforms, change it up a bit. I hate reading the same exact thing on Twitter and on Facebook. You have more space on Facebook. Have fun with the post. Enjoy it. Anyway, good stuff Steve. Have a terrific Tuesday:)
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Steve, thanks for sharing.
It’s a never-ending process of navigating the various nuances of each social media platform, and your piece here will help guide me accordingly. I use my company’s Facebook fan page to feed to Twitter, and it also appears on LinkedIn.
I’ve not come close to fine-tuning the process as you have. By the way, congrats on the Yankees having four (and possibly) more games than the Red Sox this year 🙂
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That’s why selective tweets (facebook plugin, http://www.facebook.com/selectivetwitter) is such a good idea. It only posts appropriately tagged (#fb) tweets to your Facebook profile. That way, if you do have something you want to post in both places you can, but it doesn’t automatically share everything.
Personally, I tend to keep Facebook and twitter almost entirely separate, but I know people who use selective tweets and I’m glad they do.
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It’s worth noting that auto-posting to LinkedIn is to be discouraged as well – there is an option for selective updates on there, use it people! Of course when I do have an urgent/important message I can add #fb #in on the end… very rare I do.
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Good piece, and I totally agree with you. But I think there’s another reason for doing this that you may have overlooked. Facebook seems to have recently “downgraded” status updates coming from other applications. For example, people who have set up their blogs to auto-post to Facebook have been reporting that, whereas they used to get plenty of comments on Facebook about their updates, they’re not getting them to the same degree. It is thought that Facebook is trying to encourage people engaging ON Facebook, so is not making these auto-updates from other applications quite as visible as before.
My personal experience seems to support this theory, and I’m now going to Facebook and linking to things like blog posts, instead of having them auto-update Facebook.
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That is interesting. Could force a lot of changes by lots of users. Might also backfire. When people comment on my updates, that’s often my prompt to go to FB. I may answer them & also take a quick look at my news feed, etc. If our updates don’t get as much interaction, is FB going to lose some engagement from lighter users?
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That’s an excellent point, Steve. That could very well work that way. Perhaps they don’t really want the “lighter users” – perhaps because of less exposure to advertising, and not being able to “mine” your social media habits for their own good?
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I decided this comment and the response from Vadim Lavrusik of Facebook merited a new blog post: http://wp.me/poqp6-1Bg
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Steve, the link to your FB page isn’t working. Also, I never linked FB and Twitter. I like your idea of creating a page that’s separate from your profile.
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I’m not sure I can fix that Bryan. Both links are working for me. Search for me in FB and it should take you there.
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The other problem about auto-syncing tweets to Facebook is that @ replies and hashtags lose all context in the News Feed. (There is an app called SupaSync that edits out those forms of tweetspeak–dropping replies and #s while expanding condensed URLs–to provide a much cleaner Twitter feed into Facebook, but the people who most need to use it don’t.) So thanks for doing your part to clean up Facebook!
I see that you also have subscriptions enabled on your personal profile. Most people I know seem to have chosen either to offer subscriptions or set up a public, aka fan page–sometimes converting fans into subscribers. (I, meanwhile, have yet to turn on the subscription option. I’m not sure I want to have yet another public channel to cultivate.) How do you see those two outlets working for you?
– RP
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I’m not sure how they’re going to work for me, Rob. My updates are public, so subscribing just means you can see them without friending me. I’m still deciding what to put on the journo page and what in the profile. Not sure it’s going to work well for me, but might work well for someone wanting a sharper division of personal & professional content.
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The main reason I don’t sync Facebook and Twitter, especially for professional use, is that I want to maximize the value I get from each platform’s unique functions.
I want to be able to tag the organizations or businesses I’m talking about (which is just different enough from platform to platform that I don’t know of any way to do it but manually); use hashtags for Twitter but not subject Facebook users to something that they might just think looks silly; and customize my content previews in Facebook (since the automatically generated versions sometimes make a hash of things).
I see above that there are solutions for some of these issues, but probably not all of them. (Also, on Facebook I tend to exceed 140 characters…)
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Steve, Talk to Kim Bui about this. She’s having similar issues you are. She posted some possible solutions here:
though it looks like it was taken down. Basically, stay away from 3rd party apps that sync them. And the real solution is, why the heck are we linking them together anyway? We want different kind of content (and different forms of engagement?) with Steve Buttry on Facebook than the Steve Buttry on Twitter.
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I’ve always been a stickler about that personal/professional divide–separate home and work e-mails, even separate domain names. It’s possible I worry about this too much (cc: Jeff Jarvis).
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I agree about not auto-synching Twitter/Facebook. I use HootSuite and it helps me better manage what I post on each social media site, because it forces me to think about organizing or promoting content in each venue, and make better decisions. Sometimes automation is NOT a good thing!
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I find the updates shared from Facebook to Twitter even more annoying. More and more people do this, which means my TL is clogging up with tweets that make no sense and can’t be accessed from my phone, as the url uses the browser instead of the Facebook app. You have to log in first, but then you open your own Facebook TL, instead of the post you wanted to read.
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Reblogged this on Poch Peralta.
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i just reconnected twttr to fb ’cause my fb peps were missing out on my dark ironic sarcasm that seems to get tweeted and not updated, so were taken quite by surprise when it seemed to come out of nowhere on facie one day (th police were called), now they get it at 140 chars every time i tweet so it is less alarming and they know where i’m coming from. Link em if ya have reason to and don’t if ya don’t, nothing is hard and fast.
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Steve needs to make it clear that he did not use “proper” selective apps.
I’ve never used the default apps for Facebook which don’t allow you to pick which tweets get sent. There are cases when you might want to have your messages linked, for example when getting the information to your following and your friends is urgent. Think emergency services etc from a business point-of-view and you want all receivers to get the same info.
Other platforms like TweetDeck and Hootsuite also allow you to be selective and manage FB and Twitter.
Research and training is key!
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I have my FB page updates linked to post on Twitter. I have found that works for me. I have 1-2 FB updates per day and it is almost always stuff that I want to have tweeted. And, I make sure in composing the headline for the FB update that it is less than 120 characters (to allow 20 chars for the link) and is meaningful. However, I agree that linking tweets to autopost to FB is not a good idea. I also use Hootsuite to schedule tweets to space them out. I find it annoying to see 10 tweets within minutes from the same person and I usually just scroll past them.
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[…] first person to point out that I was violating Facebook etiquette early in my social media days by syncing my Twitter and Facebook accounts so that nearly all my tweets posted to Facebook (way too often to post on FB, but an acceptable […]
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