How To Update Your Facebook Status With Selective Tweets

The Social Media Guide12 June 2010

144 3 minutes read

It is pretty easy to update your Facebook status with Twitter.

Table of Contents

The only downside with this is that every time you tweet, your Facebook status also updates.

If you are a heavy Twitter user, this can be quite annoying for your friends as their walls will be plastered with all your tweets.

Wouldn’t it be good if you could update your Facebook status from Twitter but only for the tweets you choose?

Well you can.. and I will show you how.

Selective Tweets

Selective Tweets is a Facebook application that allows you to update your Facebook status with selective tweets.

It addition to personal profiles, it also works with Fan Pages.

All you need to do is end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple as that..

After logging into Facebook search for Selective Tweets,

Click on <Go to application>,

Personal Profile Setup

To update your personal profile with selective tweets, click on the Your Profile tab –> enter your Twitter Username (eg, @SocialGuide) –> then click <Save>,

Then click on <Allow>,

Now click on the Settings tab –> Check “Allow the #fb tag anywhere in the tweet” –> then click on <Save Changes>,

Now click on <Allow publishing>,

Done!

Your changes have been saved,

Any tweets you now make, ending with #fb, should now update your Facebook profile.

(During the making of this post my selective tweets didn’t update my Facebook profile. I will discuss this further and provide a resolution to the issue I encountered in the Troubleshooting section below..)

Fan Page Setup

Selective Tweets also allows you to update the status of your Facebook Page, or any page that you are an admin for.

To set this up, click on the Your Fan Pages tab,

You now need to grant the Selective Tweets application permission to publish to your Page’s wall.

Click on Grant Permission,

Ensure your Facebook Page is checked.. then click on <Allow publishing>,

Now enter your Twitter username then click on <Save changes>,

Done!

Double-check that your changes have been saved and permission has been granted,

Any tweets you now make, ending with #fb, should now update your Facebook profile.

Update Facebook with Selective Tweets

Now that you have setup Selective Tweets for your profile and/or page.. it is time to test this out.

Head over to Twitter and send out a tweet ending with #fb,

This should now update your Facebook profile and/or Facebook page..

If it has then congratulations everything has been setup correctly!

If it doesn’t.. then read on..

Troubleshooting

If your tweets don’t update your Facebook status then make sure you read the Selective Tweets help page.

Go through all of these steps and troubleshoot accordingly.

While I was writing up this post, I noticed that my tweets weren’t updating either my profile or page statuses.

Point number 2 on the help page says to check if your tweets appear in Twitter’s search.. and to my surprise they weren’t..

Updates not appearing in Twitter search

To test to see if your tweets are appearing in Twitter’s search, head over to the search page and enter,

from:YourTwitterUsername

All tweets that you have sent out within the last few days should be displayed.

To my surprise, (while troubleshooting) I noticed my tweets weren’t being displayed in Twitter’s search results,

My Twitter username was being mentioned, but my own tweets weren’t displaying.

If your tweets (also) aren’t displaying in Twitter’s search.. then you may want to do what I did..

Contact Twitter Support

Head over to Twitter Support and submit a new request advising that your tweets don’t appear in Twitter search,

Surprisingly, I got a reply back from Twitter a few hours later advising that they had updated my Twitter account settings so that my tweets would now appear in Twitter’s search,

So I re-tested searching for my own tweets, and was glad to see they now are appearing in Twitter’s search,

Updating your Facebook Status

Now that this issue has been resolved, it is time to test it out by updating my Facebook profile and Facebook page with a selective tweet.. ending it with #fb,