Ricky Says

I showed you a while ago how to link your Facebook account with Twitter, so that whenever you posted something to Facebook it would automatically show up on Twitter.

However, I quickly discovered that many of my personal Facebook updates were "TMI" for my Twitter followers, and my business-related tweets were gobbly-gook to my Facebook friends. So I turned off the Facebook-Twitter integration.

Recently I discovered a better (and free) tool for handling Twitter and Facebook integration: TweetDeck

TweetDeck lets you create links to both your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and then lets you identify which service(s) your updates will be sent to. So you can post to just Twitter, or just Facebook, or you can update both Twitter and Facebook in one shot. That's the kind of control I was looking for!

Here's how you can set up Facebook and Twitter in TweetDeck:

1. Download and install a free copy of TweetDeck if you haven't done so already.

2. Click the Settings button in TweetDeck.

3. Select the Accounts tab and click "Add New Account".

4. Click the "Add Your Facebook Account" link and enter your Facebook account information.

You'll be asked to allow access to your Facebook account, and to allow TweetDeck to publish to your Facebook acount.

5. Type in your tweet like you normally would, and choose both Facebook and Twitter in the "From" section in TweetDeck.

I'm hooked on Twitter.

It's grown into much more than even it's original charter ever dreamed, which was (quoted directly from their sign-in page):

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Twitter has evolved into a place where people post (tweet) not only what they're doing, but what they think about any topic under the sun, resources they've found interesting, photos they've snapped from their mobile device, and even a marketplace where business connections are planted, cultivated, and harvested on a minute-by-minute basis.

How to link to a specific Tweet:

With all those tweets floating around the Twitterverse, there's bound to be one you'd like to link directly to. Maybe you want to send it to a friend or coworker, or bookmark it for future reference.

You can link to any tweet on http://www.twitter.com just by clicking the date-time below each tweet (go ahead and click the image below to try it).

That'll take you to a page showing just that tweet, which you can bookmark in your browser or share with your favorite online community.

If the tweet is a reply to another tweet, you can also view the original tweet (which sometimes is necessary to figure out the context behind what might otherwise seem like an odd comment).