This morning, a reader contacted me because every time he updated his business page status line, the status line on his personal profile was also being updated. It turned out that he was using Facebook's Twitter application to update his Facebook status and somehow it got set so that both his personal and business pages were importing the tweet. By turning off the Publish option on his personal profile, he was able to prevent the double posting.

However, this meant that if he ever wanted to post to his personal profile using Twitter, he wouldn't be able to—he'd have to go to his Facebook account and post it there again. Fortunately, if you use TweetDeck to update your Twitter account, you can also use it to update your Facebook personal profile and fan page(s) at the same time—and you can change the settings for each post if you want. You can even update Facebook without updating Twitter.

I wrote an earlier post about how to add your Facebook account to TweetDeck. However, more recent versions of TweetDeck have changed the way you do this, so I'm going to show the new steps here for adding both your personal profile and a fan page.

• Click the Settings button (looks like a wrench) in the top right corner of TweetDeck and select the Accounts tab. In the list box, you'll see a Twitter icon representing the Twitter account you originally set up TweetDeck to manage.
  
• Click the Add New Account button. Options will appear to add Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts.

  Note: You can add multiple Twitter accounts but only one Facebook account. So if you're administering multiple Facebook pages attached to different profiles (or not attached to any), you'll you can only pick one to update from here.
  

• Click the Add Facebook Account button. You'll be prompted to sign in to Facebook and grant permission to TweetDeck to access your information, publish to your stream (Wall), and stay connected so you don't have to log in each and every time. Allow all the options.
  
• Click Connect. A Facebook icon will now appear in your list of accounts.
• Click the icon and click the Add Pages button that appears. A window will pop up that shows you any Pages currently associated with your Facebook account.
  
• Pick the one you want to add and click Allow Publishing. The Settings window will now show the Page you just added with a checkmark in the Show in Update Panel checkbox.
  
• You can repeat these steps if you want to add more Pages.
• Click Save.

Now, when you have the Tweet box open, you'll see your Twitter account, your Facebook profile, and your Facebook Page listed. Simply click on the ones you want to update before you send your tweet.

Note: The links appear black when they're active and gray when they're not. (You can also mouse over them to see this info.) They will retain this state until you change it. So if you just sent a tweet to update your Facebook page, but you don't want your next tweet to do it, remember to click the link again to turn it off.

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