6 Reasons Not to Link your Facebook Account to Twitter

6 Reasons Not to Link your Facebook Account to Twitter[ 2 min read ]

When you’re time-strapped, or just new to social media, it’s a nice idea to think you could link your Twitter account to your Facebook account. That way, when you post to one, it automatically posts to the other.

Here are 6 reasons why you shouldn’t link them:

  1. Character Limits

    On Twitter you’re only given 160 characters but on Facebook, there is room for a lot more. If you’re going from Twitter to Facebook, that’s not really an issue – other than you’re missing out on adding more information and believe me, it’s a lot harder to think of a concise 160 character post than it is to write a normal one.

  2. Read More Links

    However, it’s worse if you’re posting Facebook to Twitter because your post will be truncated and a shortened link will be used to encourage users to read the rest of the post on Facebook. The link will eat into your 160 characters and so the likelihood of anyone actually doing that is slim (unless you’ve really grabbed them in those first 60 characters of the post) so they miss out on what you’re actually trying to say and to be frank, you needn’t have bothered.

  3. Images and Videos

    Another reason not to link the accounts is images and videos – both platforms handle images and videos differently and it’s unlikely that they’ll transfer across but images and videos can be quite important on both platforms. According to HubSpot’s article content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images and 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

  4. Posting Frequency

    The next reason comes down to how different the platforms are in terms of posting etiquette. On Facebook, 1-2 posts a day are considered ok and posts shouldn’t be often repeated. However, on Twitter, it’s better to post a lot more frequently and it’s more acceptable to reuse content because the high-turnover of traffic.

  5. Target Audience

    If you look at your analytics on both platforms, you may find on each platform the audience is completely different. So, when linking your accounts your message must appeal to both audiences or potentially, risk alienating one of them.
    For example, on Facebook your audience might be female dominant in an age group of 26-36 but on Twitter it might be more male dominant in an age group of 40-50.

  6. Tags and Mentions

    And the last one is tags – @ tags don’t work across the platforms and mentions are really good for doing the social part of social media!

In summary, unlink those accounts and spend the time writing more bespoke posts for the different platforms which will engage readers more and give you a better ROI.
The good news is, if you use a time-saving tool like Hootsuite, Buffer or Sproutsocial, all your post-writing can be done in one place. Hoorah!

Suzi Smart Bear

I'm Suzi - the owner of The Smart Bear.

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