How to crowdsource your Facebook Timeline

April 1, 2012

If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends.

For the past few months, I’ve been running a private experiment in crowdsourcing the contents of my Facebook Timeline. Any tweet that somebody else has favorited gets cross-posted to Facebook, so that my Facebook Timeline reflects not only my Facebook life but also my Twitter life. (Yes, they are different.) It turns out that a decent cross-section of my tweets get favorited by somebody (though not every tweet gets favorited, by any means) so this is a good way of selecting just the more interesting tweets for permanent archiving on Facebook. And to keep even those from being tedious, I have them set so that they are only visible to me, and not to any of my friends.

Or I should say, had them set. A few days ago, the service I was using to do that cross-posting (Twitterfeed) updated its Facebook posting service. This resulted in a handful of changes and glitches, including an error in how Twitterfeed handles privacy settings on Facebook: suddenly, the tweets I’d set to have posted privately were begin posted to my default privacy level (a relatively limited circle of 100 friends, but still a lot more than just me!)

While I had set up private cross-posting to avoid annoying my friends, the sudden appearance of these cross-posted tweets hasn’t caused any waves yet. On the contrary: a number of friends are liking and commenting on the tweets that are now appearing on my Timeline.

My serendipity could be your strategy. By using a service like favstar, which generates an RSS feed of any tweet that has been favorited, you can crowdsource the job of choosing which of your tweets, or which of your company’s, get cross-posted to other social networks. Use Twitterfeed to cross-post to Facebook or LinkedIn; or use If This Then That to pipe your favstar RSS feed into any one of wide range of blogs and social networks.