There are many ways to manage and integrate your organization’s Twitter account and Facebook page. I’ve tried a lot tactics in my work with CrowdVine and for the Ecology of Leadership program. Here’s what really works.

First off, you want to post to Twitter and have those posts copied to Facebook (Twitter-to-Facebook, not Facebook-to-Twitter), for these three reasons:

• If you go the other direction and use the automatic Facebook-to-Twitter service, Facebook will append its own URL to every post it makes to your Twitter account. This means extra clicking—an annoyance for your followers. On the other hand, tweets with links work great when automatically re-posted to Facebook.
• When you go from Twitter to Facebook, your staff can post and not lose their own identity on your Facebook Page. If you add them as administrators of your page, everything they post comes thru as a generic post by your organization. This is a little quirk about Facebook Pages. For example: assume you’re ABC Nonprofit and that Jane and Frank are two of your volunteer Facebook people. Frank posts photos to the ABC Nonprofit page. Jane tries to comment on a photo, but her comment appears to come from “ABC Nonprofit” and not from “Jane”. Your Facebook Page admins lose their own identity on your Facebook page. That’s social media that’s not very social!
• By posting from Twitter to Facebook, you can get all of the benefits of using CoTweet. CoTweet is a powerful application for giving teams of people the ability to post to one Twitter account. You can schedule posts for the future, manage multiple Twitter accounts from your own personal CoTweet account, and track responses from followers. CoTweet is easy to set up: create an account, and then add one or more Twitter accounts to it. For each Twitter account you set up, you can invite others in to post via CoTweet, using their own CoTweet accounts…so you never need to share your organization’s Twitter password with the members of your team. If someone leaves the team, you simply revoke their permissions through CoTweet. Here’s a screen shot of CoTweet that gives you an idea of its power:

  

Those are the reasons for a system that copies from Twitter to Facebook; now you need to make that synchronization happen.

There’s an easy solution for this: use the Facebook Application Selective Tweets. Selective Tweets will post your Twitter status updates to Facebook if they have the hashtag #fb at the end of the tweet. (If you’re using CoTweet, use their “CoTag” feature to auto-append the hashtag for you.)

Selective Tweets lets you configure specific Twitter accounts to specific Facebook Pages; you can use it for your personal Twitter account to post to your Facebook Profile AND use it for your organization’s Twitter account to post to your Facebook Page. Other Facebook Apps I’ve seen don’t have the awareness that different Twitter accounts might correspond to Facebook Pages rather than personal profiles.

Just add Selective Tweets to youyr Facebook profile grant it access to your Twitter account(s). Then use the “Your Fan Pages” tab to set up which Twitter accounts should sync to which Facebook Pages:

When using Selective Tweet, Twitter posts might take some time to repost over to your Facebook page…that seems to be normal, so give it some time for your first test.

The combination of Selective Tweets and CoTweet is the best solution we’ve found for teams to post to Facebook and Twitter in one step.

Related Posts:

• New Twitter Backgrounds
• Experiences, not features
• Top 100 Event Twitter Accounts
• Five Essential Twitter Lists For Every Event
• The Twitter Book and Other Resources