A few people have shown some confusion about how to set everything up to get the best from twitter as a Facebook social networker. Since I am a self-confessed nerd I thought I'd explain.
First, you'll need a twitter account. Go to twitter and sign up for an account. Now you can find your friends and sign up to "follow" them. This means that when they send a twitter message, sometimes called a "tweet", you will see it on your twitter page. If they follow you they will get your tweets.
Next we need a way to update our Facebook status when we send a tweet. The twitter people have written an application to do this but every time it updates your FB status it puts "is twittering" before te tweet. The application twittersync does not do this so I prefer to use it instead. Add this application and give it some details and it will read your twitter feed and update your FB status within a minute or two.
Advanced Twitter Setup
Next we'll return to the twitter page and set up some advanced things. Go back to twitter and click on "Settings" in the top right of the window. You will be on the "Account" pane of Settings so fill in the information about where you live and your time zone etc.
Now click on the "Picture" tab and upload a small picture of yourself. The one you use on Facebook would be perfect. Next click on "Devices" where we will set up twitter via SMS. This pane has two sections, one about Instant Messaging which we can ignore and the other devoted to your mobile phone. You enter your mobile number and you will be asked to send an SMS with a code to twitter to confirm your number. Send off the SMS and quickly a reply will come back to say you're number is confirmed. Save the phone number in the address book of your phone - now when you send an SMS to this number it will send a tweet and automatically update your FB status.
Viewing Your Twitter Page
When you start following a number of people you will need an easy way to get the information. If you also follow a number of websites and read newspapers online you will be spending too much of your time going from site to site checking. The way to get over this is to use an RSS reader, sometimes called a feed reader or news reader. You can even read your twitter page via RSS, you will find the address to use in your RSS reader down the bottom of your twitter home page labelled "RSS". I'm going to recommend you use Google Reader - an online RSS reader from Google. Get yourself a Google Mail account and start using Google Reader - I'll explain the powerful benefits of using Google Reader in another post.
My Facebook profile : http://profile.to/tonywilliams/
My twitter feed: http://twitter.com/honestpuck
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