Three Reasons you shouldn’t sync Twitter and Facebook

So, congratulations! You’ve mastered Myspace, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Facebook, AND Twitter. Then you found a way to integrate them! Awesome!

Don’t.

Here’s why:

1. Chances are pretty good that your Twitter followers have Facebook, Tumblr, and/or Livejournal, too. We care about what you’re doing, but we don’t care enough to read it twice. Unless you’ve just gotten engaged or given birth, what you’re doing is probably not that earth-shaking. It’s usually unnecessary to clutter feeds on both sites in an effort to make sure everyone you know gets the update. If it is, tell Twitter and Facebook separately. Go nuts and even construct two separate sentences.

2. Your tweets often won’t make sense on Facebook. People who don’t have Twitter won’t understand a lot of your updates. A RT and messages stating your latest adventure with @supercoolfriendguy are gibberish in a Facebook status or a Tumblr post.

3. Not everyone needs to know, and you don’t need to tell them. Using two (or more) social networking platforms likely means that you have two (or more) social networks. Not everything you say in one is appropriate for those in the other. This means that you’ll likely want to censor yourself on one network, which will make your use of the other less effective.

If I was going to make a fourth point, it would be — as I told Jessa — that it drives me BATTY. I read Twitter far more often than I read Facebook, and it annoys me to no end to refresh Facebook to see statuses I read on Twitter hours ago.

I have less of an issue with selective Facebook updates using the #fb hash tag, like Melissa does — so if you really don’t have time to update both separately, please consider this as an alternative.

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» Filed Under drivel, internet