Linking Facebook and Twitter: Words of advice

Please don’t link your Twitter account to automatically update your Facebook status, but if you do, remember it when you tweet. (This was a separate item in my “Facebook tips” blog post, but I’ve pulled it out.)

Facebook and Twitter are different social media, with different communication styles and conventions. If you do link your accounts (I’ll confess: mine are linked), try to be courteous toward your Facebook friends while tweeting.

Below are some of the issues that I see. If you’re a Facebook friend, and you do these things often, I’m probably going to stop following your friend feed.

• Please don’t “live tweet” events. A constant flood of messages like “John Smith is walking up to the podium” followed 30 seconds later by “John Smith is showing his first slide” is not what Facebook status updates are for.

• Please don’t retweet. RTs and @names make for lousy Facebook status updates.

• Please don’t tweet messages stuffed with hashtags. They don’t make sense in a Facebook context.

• Please don’t write in choppy fragments. Facebook readers don’t want to “unpack” your messages. Twitter-speak doesn’t make sense in a Facebook context.