How to Link Twitter and Facebook Accounts

by Tina Gasperson

Social networking is great for keeping in touch with friends and business contacts, and for getting the word out about your latest project – or just your latest vacation. Sometimes it can get difficult to manage all your online social activity, though. For example, once you’ve updated your status in Twitter, you still have to remember to update your status on Facebook because not everyone who follows you on Twitter is also your friend on Facebook. To keep up with all of that, you might find yourself spending more time online than you want to. Alternatively, you can grab a simple application that will automatically update Facebook at the same time you update Twitter, and vice versa.

First, get the Facebook application. To activate it, click on Go To Application, and then click Allow. The app will prompt you to input your Twitter username and password. Do that and click “Login.” The first thing you’ll see is an interface similar to that which you’d see if you were at the Twitter.com home page. There is a place to enter your “tweet,” and a log of all your friends’ tweets below that. If you’re content with updating Twitter automatically from your Facebook account, then this is as far as you need to go. If you’d like to have Twitter automatically update your Facebook status, then look at the upper right hand corner of the page and click on “Allow Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status.” Confirm your choice, and you’re set.

Once you’ve installed the Twitter-Facebook app, it won’t take long for you to determine which “direction” works best for you – updating from Twitter to Facebook, or updating Twitter from Facebook. Deciding which direction you want to go depends on which service you use more. If you send mobile updates via your phone to Twitter all day, then it just makes sense to use Twitter to update Facebook. If you’re in front of the computer screen all day and have access to Facebook, then you might want to take advantage of that. The only drawback in using Facebook is that to update your Twitter status you have to enter it into the Twitter application directly – simply updating your Facebook status on your profile page won’t make update your Twitter. Even so, you’ll see that linking Twitter and Facebook accounts helps take some of the work out of social networking.

Tina Gasperson (tinahdee@gmail.com), affectionately known as Computer Lady by her family, has been writing about IT, home computing, and the Internet for more than a decade.