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Five reasons I no longer automatically cross-post blog entries to Facebook

I no longer use those automatic cross-posting thingies (let's shorten that to "ACPTs") to share links to my blog entries on my Facebook page, and I advise my clients to avoid or abandon the practice. Here are five reasons.

1. Automatic cross-posting limits my control over what appears on Facebook.

ACPTs decide what to post. Typically, they send an excerpt of the first "n" characters of the blog entry to Facebook. Maybe I want the lead-in to be something other than that. Maybe I want to choose which of the images on the blog page should appear as the thumbnail. ACPTs don't give me that freedom.

2. Automatic cross-posting limits my control over when my post is posted to Facebook.

Typically, ACPTs post blog excerpts to Facebook either immediately or according to some configured schedule. I want more control than that.

3. Manual cross-posting is easy.

If it takes you more than 60 seconds to manually post a blog entry to Facebook, you're doing something wrong.

4. The results of automatic cross-posting usually betray the fact that I'm phoning it in.

The truncated excerpt is one tell. The little credit under the link ("via Wordpress.com" or "via Sendible" or "via RSS Graffiti", etc.) is another.

Why does this matter? Because is risks saying "I want you all to follow me on Facebook, but I'm too busy to return the favor."

5. Automatic cross-posting insulates me from the very same virtual water cooler (Facebook) around which I'm counting on people to interact with me.

Forget for the moment that it's pretty darned hypocritical of me to expect others to log onto Facebook so they can read my pearls of wisdom while I take shortcuts to avoid logging onto Facebook so I can read theirs.

More to the point: If I believe Facebook is a source of potentially useful information for people (and I wouldn't be posting links to my blog there if I didn't), why am I looking for shortcuts to keep me from logging onto Facebook?