So, a few days ago, I went over how to import your Twitter tweets to your Facebook status. But what if you are on Facebook more often and would rather do this the other way around? No problem!
First thing you need to do is visit the public feed of your statuses on Facebook. It is near impossible to find, so the simplest way for me to tell you to get there is to say, log into your Facebook account and then visit this link: http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11
If you take a peek at the bottom of the right hand column of that page, under “Subscribe to these Stories,” there is a blue RSS button next to the words “My Status.” Clicking that will give you the specific RSS fee for your statuses.
Your next step is to go over to TwitterFeed, a free service that imports any RSS feed to Twitter. Log in (or create an account if you don’t already have one) and go to create new feed.
Input your username and password for the Twitter acount that you want to import this to and then also input that RSS link we just got from Facebook. Set the update frequency time period and the limit of posts each time. (How frequently it updates should depend on how often you change your status. If you only update once a day, you should set a longer time period than if you change it every hour.)
Under the “Include. . . ” section, select Title only and then uncheck “Include item link” (since there is no link to include). Now, you can check “Active” and “Create the feed.”
There is only one problem now. Facebook feeds post everything with a preface. For instance, everything on my feed says, Hillary before it. For example: “Hillary wants to assure you that she will never ask any of you to wire her money via Facebook.” That is the correct format for Facebook status but will make you sound oddly impersonal over on Twitter which is usually first person.
There is one simple way to get around this. On the TwitterFeed option screen, specify a prefix to post before each post. Some suggestions are “From Facebook:”, “says:”, or “current status:” This way, your Twitter post will look like “@HillaryDePiano says: Hillary wants to assure you that she will never ask any of you to wire her money via Facebook” or “From Facebook: Hillary is not feeling well!” It’s still a little awkward that you are using third person but at least it makes a little more sense now because you are setting the stage for it.
Another far more complicated way to get around this is to set up a Yahoo Pipe, much like this one, that adds a notice to the end of each post and use that RSS link instead but, frankly, it’s not much better and is much more work.
A quick note about this page (http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11). While we just went over how to import your status only in this post, you can do the procedure I outlined to import any of the Facebook “stories” listed in the right hand column to Twitter. For instance, you can automatically import every link you post to Facebook to Twitter, every note or every event. If Facebook is where you are most active, it only makes sense to import some of that activity over to Twitter.
Why are we worrying about importing Facebook to Twitter and Twitter to Facebook? Well, both are huge social network platforms with a ton of users. If you don’t have the time to be active on both sites but don’t want to miss out on the potential network on either site, this enables you to be active on one site but post that info as if you were active on both. It’s basically a time saver since you usually end up posting the same stuff to both networks anyway.
You can play around with combinations as well. For instance, if you mostly use Twitter and want to have Twitter statuses post to Facebook you may still want Facebook posted items to post to Twitter. Once you understand how to set it up, customizing it is very easy. And there is no limit to the number of feeds TwitterFeed can handle for you.
One big note! If you already have Twitter importing to your Facebook status, don’t import your Facebook status to Twitter as well. Otherwise you will create a loop where everything keeps reposting again and again!
