Lost in Status Update Translation

With all the social media tools out there these days, many of us now have profiles on several platforms. You might use LinkedIn for professional networking but use Facebook for communicating with friends and family. Or maybe you manage your company’s social media effort and maintain a presence on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn because you’re reaching a different audience with each platform and need to have a presence on each of those sites.

Through the process of managing profiles on multiple platforms, naturally there is a desire to streamline the process as much as possible to prevent duplication of work or the need to log in and out of several accounts throughout the day. So it was no surprise when applications became available for using Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, ping.fm, etc to update your status on multiple platforms through one centralized status update.

Like many others, I was drawn to the availability of these tools in the beginning, particularly for my client projects. I thought I could save a lot of time and become much more efficient – and who wouldn’t want that? So on one of my projects, for example, our team began the process of setting our blog’s RSS feed to automatically update Twitter, using Twitter to update our Facebook Page status, and using ping.fm to pull our Twitter feed to update our LinkedIn status. With all of our status updates on autopilot, our website could virtually manage our social networks for us, right?

Wrong.

The point of social media is to be SOCIAL. In putting our social media campaign on autopilot, we removed the human element from the process – we were no longer participating in the conversations that were taking place around our brand. We were simply launching information into space, and in most cases people were either having conversations around that information on our various sites without us, or they just weren’t responding at all because it was clear that we were merely spewing information and not initiating a dialogue. The number of retweets we received on Twitter declined dramatically. The number of “comments” and “likes” on our Facebook Page dwindled – and eventually our number of fans started to decrease. We were missing out on the opportunities that come from having conversations with our various communities because in the process of being more efficient and spending less time on each site every day, we were also becoming more distant from our friends and fans.

Another side effect of the automated status updates is that the language used for updating your status on one platform doesn’t necessarily translate to the language used on another platform. This is particularly the case with regard to Twitter and Facebook. These two platforms have very different audiences, styles, customs and etiquette. The use of @ replies, abbreviated words, and the rapid-fire back and forth conversations that can happen on Twitter within a matter of moments do NOT translate well to Facebook status updates. Eventually people start to tune out (or block) your Twitter-driven Facebook status updates because a lot of them seem to make no sense. It’s also not taboo to update your Twitter status several times throughout the day, but do that on Facebook and you start to clutter your friends’ news feeds which a lot of people find annoying.

Using Facebook to update your Twitter status doesn’t work very well either – you aren’t limited by 140 characters in the Facebook status update field. So when your Facebook status gets posted to your Twitter account, if it exceeded the 140 characters then it is either cut off or your readers have to click on a link to read the full update. Also, a lot of people are more inclined to use complete sentences (or at least complete words) when writing on Facebook – which is another reason why the stunted Twitter writing style doesn’t translate well when used for Facebook status updates. Not everyone on Facebook uses Twitter and not everyone understands Twitter-speak.

Trying to marry your Twitter status with your Facebook status is basically the equivalent of walking into a bar in Germany and trying to communicate with everyone in Dutch. Sure, there are some similarities between the two languages, but after a few minutes of listening, most people are going to get tired of working to try and understand what you’re saying and they’ll find someone else to talk to.

I’m not saying there aren’t situations where automating the status update process makes sense – for some organizations it may make sense to use a streamlined process to send out certain daily updates that can be written in a style that fits all platforms. But this doesn’t replace the process of checking on the conversations taking place on your various profiles on a daily basis – and if you need to check on every page daily anyway, then why not just post the status updates while you’re there? So before you put your social media presence on autopilot, take a step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish by having a presence on multiple platforms and make sure your streamlined social media strategy isn’t counterproductive.