Many Liberal Democrat councillors and campaigners have both a Twitter account and a Facebook profile alongside their blog or website. Linking the three together efficiently can greatly increase the political impact of them individually, especially as many people find that Twitter is one of the best ways of driving traffic and Facebook one of the best places to get comments, whilst it’s on their website that is more convenient for longer or more detailed content. With each having a different role, how best then to put all three together?
The basic option that many people go for is to have a tweet generated automatically when a new story appears on their site and to have all their tweets imported into Facebook as status updates. But you can do much better than that, as I’ll explain first with the set-up I’ve now settled on for my myself and then with some examples of the benefits it brings.
Step one is to use RSSGraffiti (a free Facebook application) to import new posts from my site into Facebook. It is similar to the option to import an RSS feed into Facebook as Notes, but with the big advantage of being much more reliable.
Crucially, unlike relying on your tweets about new posts being imported into Facebook, it makes use of photos and the like in your posts to display little thumbnails when showing them in Facebook. It also shows the first few lines of the posts. Compared with having your tweets about new posts appear, this makes the entries on Facebook more eye-catching and more interesting.
My own experience of experimenting with these two routes is that you get twice as much website traffic from Facebook if you use the RSSGraffiti route than if you relying on the tweet importing.
So with RSSGraffiti in place, whenever a new story appears on your website, your Facebook profile is automatically updated as well.
Step two then is to deal with Twitter. However, if your website is set up to automatically send out a tweet when a new story is added – which is a technique that works well for many people – then you don’t want all your tweets being imported as that would mean you get an inferior echo of what RSSGraffiti is doing.
Here the combination of RSSGraffiti and a little bit of search results cleverness can help you out too. RSSGraffiti lets you import your Tweets, with the option to strip out any @ replies. Nice, but still leaves that echoing problem.
So instead use RSS Graffiti to import search results from Twitter, as you can tell it to search Twitter for your own tweets, but then also filter out some of them – and there’s a wide range of filtering options on the Twitter search results.
My own current setup, for example, is:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:markpack+-ldv.org.uk+-%22I%20liked%20a%20YouTube%22+-%22Blogged:%22+-4sq [All one long line]
Let’s take that step by step:
- http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:markpack This means search Twitter for any tweets sent from “markpack” (so you can put your own Twitter username in there).
- +-ldv.org.uk And also (the plus sign) exclude (the minus sign) any tweets which include ldv.org.uk in their text – this therefore excludes any tweets I send about my posts which appear on Lib Dem Voice.
- +-%22I%20liked%20a%20YouTube%22 And also exclude any tweets which include the text “I liked a YouTube” (%20 equals a space in this computer speak and the %22 characters are quote marks showing that it is one long search phrase) – so I can have YouTube set-up to send messages to both Twitter and Facebook when a I ‘like’ a video, gaining the nice little thumbnail on the message sent direct to Facebook and avoiding the poor echoing from a tweet also appearing.
- +-%22Blogged:%22 And also exclude any tweets which include the text “Blogged:” in them, which excludes tweets automatically generated when new posts appear on my own site.
- +-4sq And finally this two exclusion catches messages from Foursquare, so again I get the benefit of Foursquare posting directly to Facebook while avoiding the downside of a Twitter echo.
If you are not used to putting together search strings like this one, this may all seem a little complicated – but don’t let that put you off. You can start with the very simple first bullet point and add in extra sections as and when you feel like it. If there are other services from YouTube or Foursquare which you use and which post to both Twitter and Facebook, then you can add to the search string to exclude their tweets too.
Overall, it’s well worth the effort of doing this setup because you end up with:
- Stories being imported to your Facebook profile reliably
- Stories appearing in the way that most encourages people to read and click through
- Applications able to post what you are doing to both Facebook and Twitter, again using the format that gets the most interest on Facebook but without any Twitter echo
- A setup that is very flexible if or when new requirements come up (as the options available to modify that Twitter search string are numerous and powerful)
Hat-tip: Thanks to Lib Dem councillor @JohnBM whose suggestion I look at Tweetfeed started me off on looking at customising Twitter search results.