Linking Facebook group to Instagram + Twitter?

November 21, 2013 6:09 AM

I'm an admin for a Facebook group that focuses on local history and sharing / discussing old photos. We also have Instagram and Twitter accounts that we'd like to make better use of. In trying to integrate the three, I'm running into some problems.

1. I can't figure out a way to get our Facebook wall posts to dump into our Instagram account - I've tried various strategies described in how-tos I've found on line w/no luck. Has anyone successfully done this? Can you walk me through it?

2. With the death of Involver, are there any free app options for making linking to / following our Twitter feed easier? Ideally, we'd like to have an eye-catching button of some kind.

Any help will be much appreciated.

posted by ryanshepard to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: I work in nonprofit communications and in general, I don't recommend auto-posting everything to all of your accounts. Primarily because each network has its own advantages and customs and not everything is a good fit for every network, both in terms of image size, format, and tone. But also because posting the same things to all three accounts gives people no incentive to follow you in multiple places since they'll just be seeing the same things again and again. It can also be confusing, especially when people have tweets automatically posted to Facebook and the syntax looks strange.

But that said, I know how it is at smaller organizations when you don't have the time to be making individual posts to each network. You'll find it easier to go the other way around with Facebook and Instagram. IFTTT has a recipe that will take everything from Instagram and post it on Facebook. As far as I know, there's no easy way to do the reverse since Instagram is really trying to drive people to use the app on their phones. There is Gramblr which allows you to upload to Instagram from your desktop computer; that might make things a little easier but won't automate it.

As far as replacements for Involver, it depends on where you want to display it. On Facebook you can install a Twitter app that will show up in the same navigation area on the page where you can access your photos. It will display your tweets and give people the option to follow you. If you're using Wordpress to host your site, there are a ton of plugins that will give people the option to follow you and display a few of your tweets on the site.

Twitter also makes a follow button that is customizable and can be displayed on any site, but it requires that you understand a little bit of code. Another option is to use a button generator to create a good-looking button yourself that you can then have link to your Twitter page, but this also requires some HTML knowledge to implement.
posted by Colonel_Chappy at 8:07 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]