I just found this lovely app on Facebook that everyone probably already knows about: The Selective Twitter Status . If you haven’t come across this one just yet, this app will fetch any tweet you post on your Twitter stream and use it to update your Facebook status, if you append a #fb at the end of your tweet. Why is it so cool?
The rush has begun. Stars are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, so an increasing number of people is following, and they’re all probably wondering now how Twitter is different from Facebook in terms of status. The answer is pretty simple: it’s not the same community. You choose to open a Twitter account to engage in a more public conversation with people you probably don’t know enough to be Facebook buddies right away. Your personal thoughts does not necessarily fit some all contexts.
A good example: you are spending the evening at your great aunt’s house for dinner. Your Facebook status for the night:
Having a lovely dinner with Aunt Therese, so good to reminisce our past family gatherings
And Twitter:
At auntie’s. dry beans. 1920’s embroidery under my plate. suppository whiff. It’s good to see her.
That’s the first reason why the most popular Twitter app on Facebook shouldn’t be installed.
Sometimes the gradation is not so obvious, which basically means you will want to post the same status to both social networks. Personally, I use ping.fm, so if I want to send to updates to both social networks, I just have to enter @tt and @fb. Ping.fm does the rest. But if you are not using ping.fm, then it is a good tip for you.
Another creative idea this app enables is for bloggers to send out the link of a blog post to your Facebook network only when you want to. I have been using this little trick before: Just append the #fb at the end of the post’s title you want to share, and if you use a Twitterfeed-like service, the title and link of your post will be posted to Twitter. With the #fb at the end of your article name, Twitter Selective Status will pick up your tweet and update your Facebook status with it. All of this happens while you’re downstairs grabbing a house coffee and a bagel.
Some could argue that adding #fb at the end of your article could potentially mess up your SEO juice in the long run (for some reason). Maybe, I have no clue, but it provides a pretty nice service in return.
On the app side, it seems that it spots your tweet through the Hashtag ecosystem (#fb). So it’s not tracking you down, and not accidentally posting tweets that were not targeting your Facebook community.
Now I am about to test this title trick and see how many visits will come from my Facebook feed, and will share the results to see the value of this all.