I have to admit that the main social media faux pas that really makes me cringe is when I see Tweets posted from a Facebook status update. This is one of the most common mistakes made by many social media users, but is also very easily avoided.
Maybe you can be forgiven for not realising that your updates on Facebook are automatically posting to Twitter, or maybe you are fully aware, and just assume that all’s well with each and every post?
If guilty of the latter, just remember that you are relying on your Twitter followers having (a) the time to click on the Tweet to take them to Facebook to read the rest of the update, and (b) that they have a Facebook account in the first place.
- A Facebook fan page status update or post can be up to 63,206 characters long when posted direct to Facebook, or 2000 characters when posted from Hootsuite.
- A Tweet is limited to 140 characters.
Subsequently, when your fan page is linked to your Twitter account you end up with something like this ……
And on Twitter, your followers see this:-
I always advise clients to UNLINK their Facebook fan page from their Twitter account unless they can be absolutely 100% certain that their Facebook updates will never exceed 140 characters.
To do this –
- Make sure you’re logged into Facebook
- Use the http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ link.
- Find the page you’d like to unlink, and click “Unlink from Twitter”
If you manage your own social media it’s worthwhile taking a couple of minutes to unlink the two social networks – trust me, your followers on Twitter will thank you for it!
