Wordpress to Tweets to a Facebook Fan Page
Recently our Communications and Technology initiative has been working to navigate how we as an organization are using / will use some of the social media tools… we are calling this our social media experiment (an experiment because we don’t know the outcome nor really the steps we’ll use to get to stated outcome).
As part of experiment we were wanted to reuse the content that was already being created by several of our blogs on our wordpress.mu server we host. These blogs can push to our @NwoodsChurch twitter account and since that is already happening we wanted to consume the twitter content on Facebook as well.
The are are several Facebook applications that claim to work for consuming a twitter feed and posting it on Facebook, but we quickly learned that what works on a normal Facebook profile doesn’t always work for a Facebook Page for an organization.
So after a bit of time of trial and error and ignoring the step by step instructions for each application that just didn’t work, we found a solution (which i am documenting here for your use as well as my recollection should I ever need to recreate the process).
There were two main apps we tried: the “official” Twitter Application and Selective Twitter Status. Both claim they can push updates into a Fan Page Wall but we found only Selective Twitter to work.
The one major drawback to Selective Twitter is the requirement of using #fb (hash tag) in each tweet. Since our twitter account is a branded account for our organization and not someone’s personal account all tweets are applicable to go to Facebook… but this application requires the hash tag.
When installing either application if you are already using one of these apps to post to your profile’s wall your not going to have great success trying to push those updates or another twitter accounts updates to your Fan Page’s wall.
Solution, create a company alias (profile) account and make that new account an admin for the page in addition to your profile (or other Admins for your fan page).
1. With the company account login to Facebook and navigate to the editor for your Fan Page.
2. Choose Browse More in the More Applications tool.
3. Search for Twitter and choose Selective Twitter Status
4. Choose the option Add to my Page.
5. In the “Add Selective Twitter Status to your Page” window Select the your Fan Page you are configuring.
– Don’t choose “Application” unless you would like to also install the App for your profile as well.
6. The next time you browse your applications on the Edit page for your Fan Page you will see Selective Twitter. Choose Edit to configure the Application.
7. On the Edit page you will see 4 tabs select the tab “Your Fan Pages”
8. Select the page you would like to have the tweets display (if you manage only one page you won’t need to choose a selection)
9. Enter your Twitter Username
10. Check has permission and then Save.
Now all tweets for the username entered above will appear as updates to the wall of your Fan Page when they are tagged with #fb.
When using Wordpress Plugin “WordTwit” you can add #fb to the message field in the general options so all tweets from the blog are pushed into twitter then consumed by Selective Twitter Status to display on your Fan Page Wall. Below we configured the faith stimulus stories blog to push all posts to twitter with the hash tag #fb.
