Stop Linking All of your Social Accounts!

Would you give the exact same greeting to everyone you see in a day?  No, because that’s crazy.  You don’t want to be known as a weirdo, so you don’t say “Howdy partner!” to everyone you come across.  Unfortunately, when you start linking all of your accounts together, all of your followers and connections start looking at you like you rode so far into the sunset you fried your brain.

There was a time when I used to sync my tweets with my Facebook status.  It seemed logical because I was using Twitter as a method of updating my networks with snarky observations.  It was awesome.  My reach for each tweets was practically tripled because of my number of Facebook friends.

However, there came a point when my tweets were overwhelming my Facebook.  A lot of my Facebook friends didn’t care about the crap I retweeted.  They didn’t understand the awkward hashtags.  Worse, I had my blog posts linked to Facebook and my Twitter account, so Facebook would get hit with them twice.  Thank goodness LinkedIn statuses couldn’t be synced with tweets at that time, or I’d probably never have made a connection there.

It makes sense to want to link pages together.  It helps your connections find out everything you’re doing.  It makes it easy to publish stuff without thinking, “Did I forget to post there?”  However, there’s a point where if a person is connected to you in more than one instance, they are bombarded by your content.  People get enough content from everywhere else online, and they don’t want to be annoyed with ten instances of the same crappy article.

Another problem I run across is that these account are synced incorrectly, and I’ll see the same thing automatically reposted two or three times by the same person.  When it’s reached that level of meltdown, I don’t read your content and instead start thinking about ways to fix your accounts.

Consider your audiences.  Would you want the same people your connected with on LinkedIn reading everything you put on Facebook?  I sure as hell wouldn’t.  I don’t even connect this blog with my personal Facebook account because I don’t think my friends want to read this stuff daily.

If you have to integrate, do it so your audiences find relevant content.  Don’t just do it to make things easier.  You’re better than that, and your readers will appreciate you for it.

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