Facebook has had Twitter envy for the past 6 months.It was only a matter of time before facebook got it right and allowed actions on their site to jump over the facebook wall. Facebook just announced that you will be able to publish from facebook pages to twitter. Smart move for a variety of reason; the best of which it simply leverages a more friction free ecosystem to drive users back to facebook. I just hope that Twitter does not crush under the weight of these new flurry of tweets that are certain to come flowing from facebook.
This also makes Twittter even more valuable as a communication channel and will undoubtedly drive higher adoption of Twitter. Fasten your seat belts; I predict a bumpy ride.
Here is the blog post from the facebook team.
Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages
Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically.
Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.
If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile. It will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.
A number of celebrities and organizations on Facebook are already using this feature to publish the content on their Facebook Page to Twitter and reach a wider audience. They include Dane Cook, LIVESTRONG, The World Wildlife Fund, and the NBA, WNBA and D-League.
We are always looking to make it easy for you to use Facebook with your favorite websites and applications. Facebook Connect allows you to bring your Facebook profile with you across the Web. We recently worked with Yahoo to integrate your Facebook experience into Yahoo’s new homepage; we’ve built our own Firefox and iPhone applications in-house; and we built tools to help you bring your content from YouTube, Hulu and other sites into your Facebook profile.
Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely.
I was able to build this new feature from start to finish as a summer engineering intern. Next month I’ll head back to school, but I’m excited to see my work here live on through all of the people who now will both share on Facebook and tweet on Twitter right from their Facebook Pages.
