You’re cranking out some solid blog posts for your company. And you’ve just convinced the boss to let you set up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page, too. But the boss is worried it’ll take up too much time, and she asks: “Can you automatically update Twitter and Facebook with our new blog posts?” Yes, you can. Here’s how to do it reliably and for free.

Update: When I wrote this post, the method outlined in the post was the way to go – at that time. In the past several months, the social application HootSuite has evolved significantly and will take care of all this for you. I recommend trying Hootsuite first, and only messing with the following information if you have special needs.

This method will allow you to link out of Facebook’s walled garden and get maximum traffic for your publishing efforts.

Step 1: Getting RSS Updates Automatically Posted to Twitter

Twitterfeed is a handy, free website & application that will “feed your blog to Twitter.”

1. Go to Twitterfeed. Sign up for an account. Verify and login.
2. Click “Create New Feed” button

3. Click “Connect your feed to your Twitter account” button. Enter your (company) username and password on Twitter’s site and click “Allow.”
4. Enter in a name for your blog’s feed, and enter the RSS feed URL.
5. Click on “Advanced Settings” and you can choose the hourly update frequency, URL shorteners, titles, suffixes, etc.

It might take a couple of hours to get working. Once going, it’s fairly reliable unless Twitter goes down or has API issues. Check the stream every few days to make sure all is well.

Step 2: Getting Twitter Updates (‘tweets’) Automatically Posted to a FB Fan Page

Once you have your content automatically posted to Twitter, via Twitterfeed, you can then have it automatically piped to your Facebook fan page with a free (donation supported) application called “Selective Twitter Status.” Whenever you tweet with the hashtag #fb – (example: “666 Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert – http://bit.ly/poser #fb“) – Selective Twitter Status will selectively grab that tweet and post it onto your FB fan page. Here’s how to hook it up:

1. Go to “Selective Twitter Status” when you’re logged into FB.
2. Enter your (company) Twitter username and “allow” the pop-up permission to post updates.
3. Click on the “Your Fan Pages” tab and enter the (company) Twitter name next to the page you want updated. Click “save changes.”

4. Open up another browser tab and log back in to Twitterfeed.
5. On the main Feed Dashboard, click the oval “Edit Feed” button.
6. In the box marked “Post Suffix,” enter #fb.
   

   
   This tells Twitterfeed to put these characters at the end of each tweet, so that FB’s Selective Twitter Status will “selectively” post this new content to your FB fan page. This way you are free to chat with people and tweet random things, but only the actual blog posts marked with #fb will be rebroadcast on Facebook.

(Note #1: Facebook has a new built-in application that will allow you to update your Twitter feed from your FB page, which can be handy for some people. Check it out. But personally I don’t want to log into Facebook everyday and tinker around with the clunky interface and endless distractions – I want fully-automatic updates.)

(Note #2: Facebook has a popular, built-in application called “Notes” – that will easily import your blog content and/or pictures onto your fan page – and keep people stuck in Facebook’s walled garden. But as a marketer, I want to drive people out of Facebook and onto my clients’ pages – and I want to post external links.)

What If I Don’t Want the #FB Tag to Show Up On My Tweets?

The Selective Twitter Status app requires that you put the tag #FB on all tweets you want to show up on your Facebook Fan Page. This can look a little ugly, and it can slightly discourage people from sharing or retweeting the content. Here’s how I get around having a visible #FB tag on all my blog post tweets:

1. Make two Twitter accounts. Have your “main” one with the preferred username and nice background, and a secondary “dummy” account with a random username. (The purpose of the “dummy” account is just to update Facebook – it doesn’t matter who follows it.)
2. Make two Twitterfeed accounts. Have the first Twitterfeed account update your main account, and under “advanced settings” make sure it does not add any prefixes to the tweets for a nice, clean look. Have the second Twitterfeed account pipe your RSS feed to the “dummy” Twitter account and make sure the “#fb” prefix is added to every tweet.
3. Go into Facebook, click the “Application” option in the extreme bottom left bar of the screen – and find Selective Twitter Status or just click this link.
4. Set up the Selective Twitter Status application so that the dummy account, with all of the posts marked #fb by Twitterfeed, gets piped into the fan page of your choice.

Hooray! Now you’re pimpin’ the power of Web 2.0 – and you have one Twitterfeed account feeding beautiful links to your main Twitter account, and a secondary Twitterfeed account feeding #fb-tagged RSS updates to your dummy Twitter account… which all gets imported straight to your Facebook fan page – free of tags and noise!

If this sounds a little complex, it is, but for me it works well. I get an RSS feed turned into clean, clickable links that are broadcast out on Twitter and FB automagically. If you have a monthly budget, you might want to investigate Involver – which claims to offer premium features for FB page fan management – or explore other apps.

Good luck and let me know what you find or discover in the comments below!

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