Yesterday Adam Jones posted a lengthy and very detailed description of how he integrated his website into Twitter and Facebook in this thread:
http://www.activemodules.com/Commun...fault.aspx

This was an awesome post, it described quite well how to do it, and why.  It got me doing quite a bit of thinking on this, and I wanted to discuss it further.  But, since that thread was already going quite far off-topic I thought I'd create this thread to discuss the details of this a bit more.

I know Will had mentioned that they were looking at creating a Facebook App that would integrate AS, but I don't know where on the roadmap that is.  In the meantime, we have some people already doing this using some third-party utilities so I'd like to hear what other people have in-place and working.

For example, the method Adam posted yesterday was to use Twitterfeed.com to post all of the RSS feeds out to a twitter account, and then use the Twitter App in Facebook to pull all those posts into his FB wall.

I tried to duplicate his technique, but I could not get the Twitter App to work, so I tried the Social RSS App instead.  That works, but it is really-really slow (it took several hours for it to pull the posts off of my website), and I don't really want to pay them to get the faster speeds.

We implemented Adams method this morning it took us about five minutes and the first post appeared only a few minutes after that. We have been trying to do this for a while now and found Adam's instruction very helpful.

I must be doing something wrong then, I cannot get the Twitter FB App to post on my Fan Page wall at all. What steps did you take to get it working?

Dan first I verified that from my profile I was posting to Twitter ok, then went to the Twitter app and installed it and selct where to post my tweets and that was it. Went back to my profile made a test post, checked Twitter then came back to FB and it was posted. The only problem I see now is I want to change where my tweets are posted to. I do want them on my FB promo site not my primary site.

Yep, my install is definitely messed up, I cannot even remove the application at this point. I click remove, go back to the edit page and it is still there... It's like a bad burrito, it keeps coming back up! *grin*

Anyways, are you using your own profile or a Fan Page? While researching the cause of the problem, I ran across lots and lots of posts about people complaining because they could get the Twitter App to update their own profile, but not their Fan Page.

While doing that research though, I came across another App, "Selective Twitter". I installed that App, configured it for my Fan Page, and within a few minutes I had it working properly. Right now I'm testing the AS->Twitter->FB replication process out to make sure, but it looks promising.

I don't think twitter-> fb can post to a fan page.. But, you can import notes. I have twitterfeed pulling my rss news to twitter, and notes importing from the rss feed to the FB fan page.

Dan, I just replied to your question on PM.

You guys are on the right track.

I have never been able to establish a connection with the Twitter App, and the Facebook Fan Page. I ended up using my own personal account, (which I want to tend away from) but for now its better than nothing. The friends I have, primarily are the ones in the area, and I have initiated the friend request with most of them. Some dont become friends and some do, it all depends. I have nearly 1000 now, and I have cooled down from trying to get more followers. Now its all about producing good content, and getting all of the sites features in order.

Glad you all have found it useful. If they come up with a method to switch to a Fan page, please let me know. The only thing I see most Fan pages using is RSS feeds.

Yep, you can't add the twitter app to a fan page.. i even asked FB and got a no.. But FB now lets you do it the other way.. Post to your facebook wall, and it will post it to twitter.. It's a pretty cool feature, automatically trims the post and makes a link to the post on FB.. the only downside to that solution is anything that is pulled via RSS into your notes is not pushed to twitter.. So I've settled on pulling into both places.. Importing notes on facebook and twitterfeed to twitter. It's working nicely...

After fumbling around for awhile last night, I finally got my Twitter posts posting onto my Fan Page... 

Use this application instead of the actual Twitter App:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/applic...5463795461


That one works nicely with both Fan Pages and your regular profile.  It does seem to run pretty fast also, posts from Twitter were there in a matter of minutes.

The only drawback is the "Selective" part of Selective Twitter.  You cannot get it to pull "all" of your Twitter posts, but only ones that have #fb at the end of the post.

This wasn't a problem when using Adam's method with Twitterfeed, as it allows you to automatically add whatever you want as a suffix to posts.

Dan,

Great work staying at the T/S for trying to figure out a solution..

I like the idea of numerous methods, and its a good reference but I think I will stick with my current method to my own personal wall.

I like that NOTHING is restricted, and there is no way all my RSS feeds will include the FB extension, or add it to every RSS post. It just seems pointless, especially for all the users that use my RSS feeds on their own, and would wonder why there was extra characters that meant nothing...

I am sure given the time, someone will develop a natural solution, and Twitter/Facebook will team up for a better solution that fits everyone's needs.

I just want to point out that I'm using TwitterFeed to add the #fb to the end of my posts onto Twitter, and the Selective Twitter App removes the #fb before posting to to Facebook.

That being said, I agree, there has "got" to be a better App out there that will pull everything. Not sure if there is some bad blood between FB & Twitter or what, but they don't seem too interested in fixing their App (from what I have read). Speaking of which, I "still" cannot remove the Twitter app from my pages, it just keeps coming back like a [insert analogy here].

Anyone have any other integration methods?

Any new insight on this topic for those that have been doing this for awhile?

Other than finding out that the FB apps are pieces of !#$), no news here. I've had to uninstall and re-install the app a couple of times now. The Twitterfeed part is working flawlessly though.

All these solutions are great for us running the communities and some champion users. For this to take off with the regular users, I think we need to have a direct sync between their AS journals and FB profile walls, just like the AS/Twitter sync is working now ... Will, any news on this?

I've followed this method of using Twitter to funnel users to my site and have done quite well with it. In addition, I purchased an app called TweetAdder which allows you to automate following/unfollowing/follow back and responses. By using it's integrated search facility, I've been able to get 919 followers in about 3 weeks by following others with the same interest.

I'm about at the point where I am considering taking a baseball bat and doing a road trip... This integration between Facebook and Twitter is so finicky it makes my head hurt! I've gone round and round with different applications and techniques, only to have them not work. I can get one configuration working flawlessly on one fan page, and then set up another one EXACTLY the same way and it simply wiil. not. work.....

I've been having pretty good luck with twitterfeed. They just added the capability to post to pages on facebook a couple weeks ago. It works awesome..

That was the next approach I was going to look into. Does it support fan pages or just personal pages?

It supports Fan pages..

Cool... I'll test that one out tonight!

I'd raise a bit of caution about this mechanised approach to feeding links to twitter and they then being fed to Facebook.

I think it may be a worthwhile short term tactic but I have real doubts that it is a good long term strategy.

Keep this in mind. One of the great powers of Twitter is having people who follow you choosing to "Retweet" one of your messages on to their army of followers. This is how you can really extend awareness of your brand/site/service to a wider pool of people.

Problem is that by taking this mechanised approach your twitter account appears as one steady stream of hyperlinks and nothing else. Such an obviously mechanised approach is not one that lends itself to getting others to "Retweet" you. Indeed if you look through the last seven days of references to "Yokosukabase" on Twitter ( see the results here) you will not see one incident of someone among the 900+ followers choosing to Retweet anything, despite there being scores and scores of Yokosukabase Tweets.

I think as the Twitter platform evolves and matures there will be a rising to the top (algortithimiaclly or organically) of Twitter accounts that offer a non-mechaniosed approach, that have a bit of character. I honestly would not be surptised if mechanised Twitter accounts become labeled as some sort of spam in the twitter world.

Just my 2 euro cents.

Eoghan

I am going to both agree with you and disagree with you...

First of all, I agree that this is clearly a mechanized approach to posting on other social networking sites. And, I will agree that Twitter (along with all other social networking sites) is going to evolve in the near future to become something else. The sites we know right now will not exist in their same form.

But, I will disagree with you about the interpretation of mechanized tweeting (or whatever other site you want to refer to) makes it almost pointless simply because nobody is re-tweeting the post. Why? Because that is not the greatest power of Twitter.

Okay, that point is arguable... *grin* But take a look at the actual Twitter users, the ones you don't see. While I have no data to back this up right now, I am throughly convinced that for every one person that posts on Twitter, there are thousands of others that never post but use the site daily to keep up on news and other information.

To me, that is the greatest power of Twitter, the abiility to receive short messages with status updates, news, etc... On my own account, I follow several other Twitter users, but not one of them is an actual person, they are all mechanized updates. From there, all those posts are forwarded to my phone and I can get near real-time updates of news and other things (such as Will posting that he released a new version of AS). I hardly ever log onto the Twitter website, I have never sent a Tweet, and probably never will. But, I use the site hourly, via my phone. I have the feeling that there are literally millions of Twitter subscribers that do the same thing I do. To re-tweet is not that important...

So, in my case, a mechanized feed is much more preferrable. The same concept goes for other social networking site, such as Facebook, where people follow news feeds, become fans, etc. just so they get the news automatically.

As another example, where I work we post a LOT of information on our website. But, hardly anyone ever takes the time to visit the website and go through all the menus to read what is going on. So I added Twitter and Facebook as a mechanized feed for all of the posts on our website. That simple action brings tons more people to our website than would have visited, because the news is presented "where they are", they don't have to go looking for it.

As a last example, I have one website right now that is not live, but I post announcements to the couple of dozen people that are there on a regular basis. Whenever I post my updates in AF, they get passed out to Twitter and Facebook (using the above method) automatically. Within one hour, I get at least thirty hits on each forum post from people that are not even members of the website. By posting all of this using this method, even without re-tweets or followers, the message is getting out there to people that never would have seen the site otherwise!

This is a great conversation. I wonder about this as well. Actually, I worry that an over zealous group admin could piss off a lot of people on FB with my url tied to it.

About six months ago a magazine site we work with sometimes connected their forums and activity streams to FB (I think they use Jing). It drove me CRAZY. I turned them off because they were flooding my FB news with "Joe posted about a ride tonight", "Peter replied to Joe's post about a ride tonight".

An absolutely negative thing to do IMHO from a user experience/brand building perspective. If I wanted to see what was going on on their forum, I'd check it out. Don't put your forum on my FB page.

I tend to focus more on elective posting and tweeting from our members. I'm always happy when I see a link to a discussion or ride or trail day on FB and the link is on BikeClicks. I know we're doing something right.

Yes, that is something we should not forget.... There is a point where there is too much information being passed through these methods, and when it becomes more annoying than useful (becomes spam) the people will stop following your feed.

Every website/feed is going to be different on where they reach this tipping point and the admin will have to make the decision on what to post or divide among different feeds. Some sites will not benefit from these methods and some will grow unbelievably fast because of them.

Agreed - very nice conversation!

The AS-Twitter-FB connection for admins is a good option, but I agree it really needs to be used with caution. Also, for our normal users who simply want to share what they are doing on our site with their FB friends, I suspect very few would use this workaround.

What I'd really like to have is for our users to easily be able connect AS-FB, just like the AS-Twitter integration, so they automatically can share whatever activities they are doing, whether 3rd party game/app results, or status updates with their FB friends. This would be best for the users ... and definitely have the best viral effect for the site owners as well.

@Will: how is the development for the direct AS-FB integration going? (haven't updated myself on this for a while, so this might have been posted previously)

Posted By Dan Ball on 17 Nov 2009 05:48 PM
<-snip->
Okay, that point is arguable... *grin* But take a look at the actual Twitter users, the ones you don't see. While I have no data to back this up right now, I am throughly convinced that for every one person that posts on Twitter, there are thousands of others that never post but use the site daily to keep up on news and other information.

Well, now I do have proof...

money.cnn.com/2010/03/10/tec...htm?hpt=C2

I disagree. My site gets nearly 70,000 visitors now. Most of them would of never ever found JapanBases.com if it wasnt for FB and TWITTER. Everything i was doing continues to bring the 2500-3000 visitors each day. Something must be working, if I continue to get the traffic. Some people of course complain about all the feeds. OH WELL.. I just tell them to de-friend me or hide me on FB.