Cross Posting A Socmed No-No?

The other day I had a short, but very interesting conversation on Twitter with Tim Walker and Julie Hunt, two Austin-area web marketing pros. It all started with this tweet from Tim:

As more people get involved in more and more social media settings, there is a temptation to try to automate posting as much as possible. There are services which will allow you to post in once place and the service will automatically send that post to the other selected services. Some services, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have bots or applications which will grab your postings from other sites (mostly Twitter) and pull them into your stream on their service.

On the one hand, this seems like a handy way to be involved everywhere at once. But there are some downsides you need to be aware of:

1. I wrote about the downside of cross posting from Twitter to Facebook earlier this year. (This is one of my more popular recent articles, too.) In that piece, I point out that if you port tweets with links from Twitter, Facebook won’t pull the nice description and thumbnail into the link. I think the link with the thumbnail is much more eye-catching.
2. Something noted in the comments of the article about Facebook noted above is the use of hashtags (the “pound sign” as in “#subject”) which are commonly used on Twitter to help people track comments and conversations on the service. These aren’t used on other services and can cause confusion to those who are not into Twitter.
3. On Twitter, if you want to send a message to someone’s attention, you add “@” to the message, something like this: “@rehor this is a great topic.” Like hashtags, these are lost on other services. Although Facebook has adopted this, it’s really more of a Twitter thing.
4. Speaking of “@” messages: If you’re cross-posting your Twitter feed to other services, only the “@” messages from you in a Twitter conversation show up in your stream. Your followers on those other services will only see half of a conversation, which won’t make much sense to them.
5. As Tim pointed out in our conversation, sending all your tweets to LinkedIn does cause some clutter. This is especially true since LinkedIn combined all messages from and about contacts into one stream like Facebook’s wall.
6. I find that my followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are made up of quite different audiences. I only “friend” people on Facebook I actually know, and most of them aren’t interested in my comments on social media or web development. I recently set up a separate Facebook page for this blog so those who want can follow more business-related stuff from that page.
7. The 140 character limit to tweets does not apply on Facebook and LinkedIn. While the character limit does force Twitter users to be concise, sometimes to the point of confusion, why limit yourself if you don’t have to? I’m not advocating writing War and Peace in your Facebook or LinkedIn comments, but a little extra verbiage can sometimes be a good thing.

For a time last year, I did run my Twitter feed to my Facebook wall. I found I spent so much time answering questions about things which made no sense to my friends there that it wasn’t worth whatever benefit I might get from being more active. I do still port my Foursquare check ins to Facebook, though, mostly so folks there can know what I’m up to.

What about you? Do you automatically cross post your Twitter feed to other social media services? Why or why not? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Tagged as: communications, facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, sem, social media, twitter