Two Stones with One Bird

*Update – July 31, 2012 – unfortunately, Twitter recently burned down that selective hashtag bridge to Linkedin. Tweets will not show up on Linkedin, but Linkedin updates will show up on a a twitter post. As a last resort, you can tweet from Linkedin with a #fb hashtag after completing the operation which follows below.

Recently I decided that my personal and business updates really can be condensed into 140-character tweets. I also realized that Facebook has become a platform more for sharing memes, cat lolz, and drunk photos, while LinkedIn probably should only contain things I would say to a future employer. I’m cool with tweeting automatically to LinkedIn and Facebook , but I needed to be selective about what goes where.  It’s all in the hashtag, my friend. All in the hashtag. Let’s make that work for us.

Definition: A hashtag is a sweet little combo of the “#” symbol followed by some letters and/or numbers which allows software to process and categorize your block of text.

#ln

LinkedIn got me started on this. I was exploring the user settings and my eye chanced upon something mentioning Twitter. What could I do but click? What followed were some very simple instructions which I suggest you heed. Make sure you activate “Share only tweets that contain #in (#li also works) in your LinkedIn status.”

LinkedIn Settings

LinkedIn Twitter Settings

This is all you need. Now post something business-y or resumee-ish in twitter including the #in or #li and see how it shows up in all its elegant simiplicity.

#fb

Now that the ball was rolling I had my feelers out for an autopost Facebook hashtag. Facebook does not have this built-in, it turns out, but a crafty developer by the name of Andy Young has put together a Facebook plugin which will do the this for you: see Selective Tweets and follow the simple instructions. In my case I had to repeat some steps before it worked fully. The result? Only and all tweets marked with the #fb will automatically become your Facebook status updates.

Slective Tweets by Andy Young