Facebook announced that they’re integrating Fan Pages with Twitter and if you want to understand what this means for your business check out Jeremy Pepper’s blog post on it.
From a “What this means for Twitter” it’s pretty simple – they’re now just a channel that (even more so) drives people away from their site and over to Facebook. It also helps Facebook close the loop on owning your internet experience with brands. Today I linked my Fan Page with my Twitter account and it works seamlessly. Will I post every nonsensical tweet to my Fan Page? No — but I can probably post at least a quarter of what I tweet from my Fan Page, which means Twitter’s monthly impressions just went down. Oh, and as Facebook’s metrics and reporting system matures, don’t be surprised if the return bit.ly links are included in their administrative interface. Also – since Facebook is using bit.ly you currently lose the tracking from those truncated links unless you post your own links via bit.ly or whichever service you use as part of your status update.
Something else to consider if you are thinking “Great! My company only needs to update once!”:
Not so fast.
Sure, it sounds like the ultimate solution for consolidating your Twitter and Facebook accounts. But consider the audiences: People may follow you on Twitter but not be a Fan on Facebook (think subscribing to RSS vs. having an emotional connection to a brand). That’s a quite a difference when it comes to how you interact or choose to engage with a brand, as one (Twitter) may lead to the other (Facebook), but it’s not a given.