In my earlier posts, Read, Send, and Share Tweets on Facebook and Send Tweets to Facebook Using TweetDeck, I gave instructions on different ways to have your Twitter tweets automatically post to your Facebook profile as your status line.

This can save you a lot of time and effort, especially if you're a prolific Twitterer and you don't want to duplicate every post on Facebook as well. However, there is one situation where you may want to consider re-posting—when you want to share a link to an article or some other content on the Web.

There are two reasons for this.

First, when you use the Link feature on Facebook, it publishes a bit of a description of what you're linking to, as well as a thumbnail if there's an image on the page.

Second, it provides a Share link under the post so your friends can easily share it with theirs.

Even if you paste the URL directly into the What's On Your Mind? box, Facebook recognizes it as a link and expands to show that box.

However, when it imports a tweet, either directly from Twitter or from TweetDeck, it converts it into a simple status update, which doesn't offer either the description/thumbnail or the Share feature. (I assume the latter is because they think most people want to keep information about what they're doing more private than links to other websites, which is also probably a pretty good bet...)

So if you're wanting your friends to pass this link around to others (which I'm assuming you are if you're posting it on Twitter), you'll have a better chance of that happening if there's more of a description or a picture to catch their eye and a Share link to make it one-click simple (as opposed to having to cut and paste it into their own What's On Your Mind? box).

Of course, if you do this and you've got Twitter set up to update Facebook, you're going to end up with two posts with the same link on your Wall and in your friends' newsfeeds. I wouldn't worry too much about that, because there are so many updates flying fast and furious on Facebook, I don't think the occasional duplicate will bother your friends. But if you don't want this to happen (or if you're posting a LOT of links in quick succession) you can fix this easily by going onto your Profile page and mousing over the post that came in via Twitter. A Remove button will appear and you can delete it. That will remove it from your Wall and your friends' newsfeeds.

Note that some friends may still see both posts if they're on their home page when they come in. But the deleted one goes away pretty quickly so, in most cases, I think most people will only see the one you posted directly on Facebook.

Posted in Facebook, How To, QuickTips, Social Media, Twitter