It's an institutional account I follow on Twitter but not on Facebook so I wouldn't have seen it twice, but that link certainly didn't add value.

The content of the posting was about tips for a certain activity but following the link didn't take me to the tips, it took me to FB where I could then follow the link to the actual tips. Felt like bait & switch.

If FB would flag those links with a distinctive URL so you know you're going into FB, that would be a vast improvement.

I'm disconnecting our connection now that tweets to @WSUSpokane when we post to http://www.facebook.com/WSUSpokane. Thanks for helping me see the light!

@BarbChamberlain

I do have a couple of thoughts on why it might be okay to have a set-up in which Facebook feeds Twitter (NOT the other way around because of the volume and cultural/linguistic differences others have noted):

1) Tweets go by and people don't see them!

As long as you don't make it a simultaneous posting on both, which would mean seeing it once in the Twitter direct posting and immediately again in an identical Facebook posting, why not give followers a chance to catch it as it comes from Facebook?

I think of tweets as a river flowing by. If you throw the stick in only once and it floats past when I'm not looking, I don't see it. The second chance via FB feed to Twitter might come at a time when you're looking. That's the same reason we might repeat information solely within Twitter once in a while (not in a spammy way): to increase the chances that followers read it.

2) You might recruit some FB fans who now only follow you on Twitter by bringing them into the FB space via the link, which is where they need to be in order to become a fan of your page.

As for concerns about being available to reply in Twitter when it went out via FB, there's no guarantee that I'm available to respond immediately in any case. As long as it's an @ message, I'll see and respond to it.

That's probably the reality for just about anyone managing social media in higher ed these days–we don't have time to sit on the account all day and pounce on @ messages (or replies to postings on FB, for that matter).

While things CAN happen in real time in these spaces, they also allow for asynchronous communication. I'm not posting anything so time-sensitive on Facebook that I'd blow it by not being available there or in Twitter.

I wouldn't post messages on FB that look stupid when they get to Twitter, like “follow us on Twitter.” But “Here's a link to all our social media accounts” works in either space and fosters some cross-fertilization.

Main reason I can see for not linking them, which you haven't mentioned–I'm a tracking freak and want to know all the click-throughs I generate in these spaces. I can't track stats on the automatically generated FB link the way I can a bitly link I create and log. If I want to know whether Twitter is driving traffic to FB, I'll do that via my own link.

Since we don't do that many status updates, I don't see a real down side in having FB post to Twitter, frankly. Other direction? Absolutely not! (Learned that the hard way on my personal accounts, where I go to make all my learning-curve mistakes :D)

@BarbChamberlain
Senior Fellow, Society for New Communications Research @SNCR
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Washington State University Spokane
@WSUSpokane
http://www.spokane.wsu.edu
http://www.facebook.com/WSUSpokane