Monday, July 6, 2009

6 Ways to Integrate Twitter and Facebook

Twitter and Facebook are not the only social media sites out there-not by a long shot. But they are of course two of the most well known and widely used. They are also very similar in that they both essentially function as "status updates." Because of this similarity, some really great tools and applications have come out which allow users to integrate the two. Here are six of the tools I have used and like:

Twitter clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck: These are two Twitter desktop clients that allow you to browse your friends' Facebook status updates and update your own status right from their interface-no need to have a web browser open or be logged into the Twitter or Facebook sites.

Twitter or Selective Twitter Status applications: These two Facebook applications allow your tweets to automatically be posted to your profile. Selective Twitter Status is great because you decide which specific tweets go to update your Facebook status by adding #fb after them. This way your friends who aren't familiar with Twitter lingo aren't confused by your frequent status updates.

Vlingo application: Vlingo is a free application for the Blackberry, Nokia and iPhone. It allows you to update your Facebook or Twitter status using your voice right from your phone!

FriendFeed application: If you use FriendFeed, which consolidates all of your social media activities across different networks in one place, you can add the Facebook FriendFeed application. If you are importing your Twitter feed, every time you tweet it will post to your Facebook wall. This may be preferable to updating your status with every tweet such as with the Twitter for Facebook application.

Tweetpo.st: Tweetpo.st is a very cool site which allows you to post tweets as Facebook status updates, post links you tweet on your Facebook wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed), ignore @replies, change @mentions to real names and more. It does all of this by using Facebook Connect.

Custom Profile Box or Extended Info applications: Finally, if you are just looking for a way to let your Facebook friends know that you tweet and encourage them to follow you, you can add one of these Facebook applications. They both allow you to insert a graphic or text, which you can then easily link to your Twitter profile. For example, I added a clickable Twitter bird logo that reads "follow me on Twitter."

Now you can save time and expend less effort on the two most popular social sites by using these helpful (and free!) social networking tools.

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