How to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter

Well it looks like Face­book and Twit­ter are now play­ing nice. If you’re logged into Face­book, this page will walk you through the pro­cess of hook­ing things up so that your Face­book updates will go out to your Twit­ter feed. Select what you want, and pro­tect the rest. I’m going to leave this post as…


Well it looks like Face­book and Twit­ter are now play­ing nice. If you’re logged into Face­book, this page will walk you through the pro­cess of hook­ing things up so that your Face­book updates will go out to your Twit­ter feed. Select what you want, and pro­tect the rest. I’m going to leave this post as it is, but the link above is really the one you should use to make this happen.

I’m in the midst of fig­ur­ing out a bet­ter way to auto­mat­ic­ally build a list of ‘tweets’ and have them sched­uled through­out the day. My cur­rent sys­tem is a bit broken.

A friend pinged me on Face­book say­ing that he was look­ing for some­thing else, an app that would post your Face­book status to Twit­ter. I thought check­ing this out would be easy, but giv­en the changes Face­book has been through over the last while the res­ult­ing solu­tion is a mashup, not an app.

Yes, it’s pos­sible, not pretty, but pos­sible. Here’s how to do it. Some of this inform­a­tion was gleaned from Tech­LifeWeb and JeffSandquist.com (thanks!).

  1. In FB, go to your Inbox > Noti­fic­a­tions page
  2. At the bot­tom of the right column, there’s the link for the Noti­fic­a­tions feed… right click on it and copy the link (or hit prop­er­ties and copy the URL that shows up in the new window)
  3. To test that it works, paste that URL into your browser and hit enter. (You’ll see your noti­fic­a­tions feed show up)
  4. In that URL, change ONLY the por­tion that stays “notifications.php” to “status.php” and hit enter.
  5. The res­ult­ing page ‘should’ be your Face­book Status RSS Feed. Here’s mine for an example.
  6. Copy your entire URL to a text doc­u­ment and save it. You’ll need it later.
  7. Get a Twitterfeed.com account. Twit­ter­feed lets you har­vest your RSS feed at a set fre­quency and pub­lish your feed to a Twit­ter account.
  8. Cre­ate a new Twit­ter­feed using the long Face­book URL you saved earli­er, set your pub­lish fre­quency, and you’re done.

Cur­rently Twit­ter­feed is hav­ing some con­sist­ency issues — some, but not all of my feeds are being pub­lished cor­rectly. They are aware of the issues and are work­ing to fix them.

Comments

42 responses to “How to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter”

  1. bgrier (Brad Grier) Avatar

    Twit­ter Comment


    Blog: Post­ing your Face­book status to Twit­ter: How­To [link to post] http://post.ly/1J53

    Pos­ted using Chat Catch­er

  2. Randy Avatar

    .: Brad — wow! — well done. I’ll try this shortly (am home sick at the moment, not much energy). I would have NEVER come up with any­thing like this. Is it work­ing? I real­ize that you are the man to fol­low, so I’ve added this blog to my Read­er. Thanks for invest­ig­at­ing this after my earli­er question. 🙂

  3. Brad Grier Avatar

    Thanks Randy. The solu­tion was on the oth­er sites, just needed to be updated slightly..which I did. Stand­ing on the shoulders of others..etc…

    And thanks for the blog link! Do let me know set­ting it up goes, and your thoughts on the pro­cess, if you’re so inclined 🙂 Twit­ter­feed is mostly work­ing for me, but they are hav­ing a few issues..but are work­ing on them.

  4. Randy Avatar

    Hi Brad. I set it up a couple hours ago, and just checked my Twit­ter feed. I had pos­ted a FB status update a couple hours earli­er, and that update has not appeared on my Twit­ter feed, des­pite hav­ing suc­cess­fully fol­lowed your instruc­tions. I set up an account with Twitterfeed.com, and pas­ted in the RSS feed for my status updates, and my notes as well. Noth­ing has appeared on my Twit­ter page.

    Is it work­ing for you?

  5. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Randy, some­times it takes a while for the Twit­ter­feed to ‘engage’. It looks like that has happened as your Twit­ter stream includes links from FB, with the source applic­a­tion lis­ted as Twit­ter­feed. You should be good to go.

  6. Brad Grier Avatar

    And, accord­ing to this Read­WriteWeb post, Face­book is in the midst of devel­op­ing its own Twit­ter App…which would make these ser­vice-level-gym­nastics redundant.

  7. Randy Avatar

    Thanks Brad. You’re right, what I did­n’t real­ize was that Twit­ter­feed pulled my last four status updates, and added them in reverse chro­no­lo­gic­al order. Duh.

    Thanks again. Clearly I need to pay­ing closer atten­tion to your mus­ings on Byte-Sized Tech­no­logy In Easy-to-Under­stand Language! 🙂

  8. Brad Grier Avatar

    And hope­fully we won’t have to rely on this work­around, if Face­book really is work­ing on a Face­book to Twit­ter application…we’ll see 😉

  9. Nicole Avatar
    Nicole

    I keep get­ting http 403 error The web­site declined to show this webpage
    HTTP 403
    Most likely causes:
    •This web­site requires you to log in.
    Am I doing some­thing wrong???

  10. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Nicole, I’m not sure why you’re get­ting that error…at what stage do you get it?

    –Brad

  11. Nicole Avatar
    Nicole

    It’s when I change the notification.php to stauts.php It then goes to that error message.

  12. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Nicole, what’s the full URL you use before you change notifications.php to status.php?

  13. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hmmm, noth­ing unusu­al there Nicole, per­haps you have to adjust the secur­ity or shar­ing set­tings on your face­book minifeed? I’m not sure what they ‘should’ be set to, but will look into it a bit more in the next day or so.

  14. chris Avatar
    chris

    I’m try­ing to cre­ate a feed of my status, I have my ID & key inform­a­tion cor­rect, and when I try to check my feed I get the dreaded “This feed URL is no longer val­id. Vis­it this page to find the new URL, if you have access…” page. 

    Has any­one dis­covered the cause of/solution to this prob­lem? Is there any­thing in the pri­vacy set­tings that pre­vent the status from feeding? 

    I’ve gone into my Set­tings > Pri­vacy > Pro­file set­tings and selec­ted ‘Every­one’ for ‘Status and Links’. Under Pri­vacy > News Feeds and Wall > Actions with­in Face­book, I have checked all of the boxes.

  15. neevita Avatar

    I am hav­ing the same issue as chris, and have taken the same pri­vacy actions to no avail.

  16. […] Liens: Ce bil­let est gran­dement inspiré de: bradgrier.com […]

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Merci beau­c­oup!

  17. Sean Avatar
    Sean

    Please help. This is driv­ing me mad. I want to do the same thing — to get the RSS feed address of my Face­book status so I can put it in my aggreg­at­or or per­son­al web site, but every­body keeps say­ing, “Go to the Inbox > Noti­fic­a­tions tab.” There IS NO SUCH THING! I am not los­ing my mind. Why is this such a freak­ing hard thing to do? Is there a set­ting in my Face­book that is block­ing my abil­ity to see the Noti­fic­a­tions tab? What’s the big secur­ity con­cern? If I want to allow my Status updates to be avail­able as an RSS feed, that’s my prerog­at­ive, not Facebook’s.

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Hi Sean,
      No, you’re not crazy, that link is not there now. It seems that Face­book has updated the site’s nav­ig­a­tion since this post was pub­lished, but not addressed RSS feeds. In fact, their own help on RSS Sub­scrip­tions is still out of date:

      How do I sub­scribe to my Face­book Notifications?
      If you would like to cre­ate an RSS Feed for your Face­book Notification…
      If you would like to cre­ate an RSS Feed for your Face­book Noti­fic­a­tions you can do so by going to your Inbox and select­ing the Noti­fic­a­tions tab. On the fol­low­ing page will be the option to “Sub­scribe to Noti­fic­a­tions” on the right. After click­ing “Your Noti­fic­a­tions”, Face­book will gen­er­ate an RSS Feed that you can save to your book­marks folder and view in your browser. You will now have an auto-updat­ing RSS Feed that alerts you of import­ant things on Face­book involving your account (i.e. Wall posts, photo tags etc).

      So I’d sug­gest pinging their sup­port folk and ask for some clarification…

      Good luck!

      – Brad

  18. Rex Strother Avatar

    This is great and is work­ing for me.

    But ques­tion — is there a way to cre­ate a sim­il­ar feed for pho­tos that I post on FB. As I post pho­tos to my wall or to an album, I’d love to ping that out as an RSS.

    Is there some tweak to the URL that would grab those? I tried some obvi­ous guesses, but they were no go.

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/%5Bphotos%5D or [album].php?id=507536722&viewer=507536722&key=bf2ab35700&format=rss20

  19. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Rex, I did a very quick google and also looked around Face­book, but did­n’t have any luck find­ing a solu­tion. Which is too bad, because this just rein­forces the ‘walled garden’ of Facebook. 

    As an altern­ate, you could get a free flickr account and have those images piped into Face­book by link­ing your flickr account to face­book. It’ll res­ult in an entry like this one: http://www.facebook.com/brad.grier?v=feed&story_fbid=155695335737&ref=mf

  20. Rex Strother Avatar

    Thanks Brad — I sent you a Friend Request on FB so I could see your example. Or could you post a link to a screen capture?

  21. maheshone (Mahesh Mohan) Avatar

    Twit­ter Comment


    @PatrickTiew Hey, try http://bit.ly/4cozmo, http://bit.ly/3LFuDB, [link to post] it should help you.. 🙂

    Pos­ted using Chat Catch­er

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Hmm, I just tried it using the first example you lis­ted — with notifications.php instead of status.php — and got a val­id RSS file in return — see this image: http://twitpic.com/1074ks

      Not sure what error you’re getting?

  22. Jaycatt Avatar
    Jaycatt

    I get the exact same error as thomas (#24). All the web­sites that tell you “Oh, just replace ‘noti­fic­a­tions’ with ‘status’ and it works great” must not have tried it recently. Sure, it works with ‘noti­fic­a­tions’ but you can­’t get sim­il­ar res­ults with ‘status’. I’ve been strug­gling with it for over an hour, I think Face­book has just locked it out or something.

  23. Robert Avatar

    Yes Thomas knows he gets a val­id RSS with the noti­fic­a­tion page. It is when he changes noti­fic­a­tion to status which is the wall, it errors.

  24. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hmm, I’m won­der­ing if it’s an account-based set­ting. I just tried both my Status URL and Noti­fic­a­tions URL and both return the RSS feeds as they should.

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=566085737&viewer=566085737&key=a6c39deda0&format=rss20

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=566085737&viewer=566085737&key=a6c39deda0&format=rss20

  25. Tommy Christanto Avatar
    Tommy Christanto

    Hi Brad,
    I have try before
    it was ok, but now it return me:

    Tommy Christan­to’s Face­book Status Updates
    http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?status&id=694224065
    Tommy Christan­to’s Face­book Status Updates
    en-us
    StatusSyndicationFeed
    Face­book Syndicationhttp://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
    webmaster@facebook.com

    although i already set all on account > pri­vacy set­ting to everyone
    any idea?

  26. Brad Grier Avatar

    Hi Tommy, check out this link — it seems to be the simplest way to hook Face­book into Twit­ter: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/

  27. Laenne Avatar
    Laenne

    Re: #30 — yes, but it only links *pages* you are an admin for, not your own pro­file status updates.

    I, too, am get­ting the error mes­sage when I try to change “noti­fic­a­tions” to “status.” How are your pri­vacy set­tings set for your pro­file? Though, acc. to #29, set­ting pri­vacy to “every­one” still isn’t working.

    Kind of puzz­ling, this one. Thanks for every­one’s comments/suggestions/relaying tri­als & errors — and for con­firm­ing that a few of us are not alone in our frustration!

  28. Rex Strother Avatar

    If it will help — even with the new FB upgrade, my FB status updates are still being trans­mit­ted cor­rectly via Twit­ter­feed to Twit­ter (not that any­one is fol­low­ing them; but at least I don’t have to do any­thing to get them there).

    The link I am using at twit­ter­feed is (per­haps this will help oth­ers to see a work­ing one?):

    http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=507536722&viewer=507536722&key=bf2ab35700&format=rss20

  29. OttoBalles Avatar
    OttoBalles

    Hey, first off Face­book changed status codes so they are not the same as noti­fic­a­tions. You can do the same trick but go to Account->Application Settings->Notes then on the right there will be a link to sub­scribe to friend’s notes, copy the link and then try chan­ging “friends_notes.php” to some­thing else.
    My prob­lem is that I’m get­ting double posts like:
    John is happy
    John is happy
    And one will be a link?
    Any solu­tions to this?

  30. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    This func­tion­al­ity may have stopped work­ing… the RSS has­n’t updated since late Thursday night, although I have updated my Face­book status sev­er­al times since then.

    I am won­der­ing if, per­haps, this means FB is about to flip the switch on a dir­ect feed from Face­book status to Twit­ter for user accounts (as noted above, it only works for “pages” now).

  31. Andrew Avatar

    What’s odd is that the URL that Rex gave above works, but when I sub­sti­tute my own ID for his, it does­n’t. So I cre­ated a second account, made myself my only friend, and tried it that way — still no joy. 

    So it really does feel like a case-by-case thing, unless I’m miss­ing something.

  32. Brad Grier Avatar

    @Andrew: Yeah, I know. It’s frus­trat­ing to not have more info on this…and it seems like Face­book has done a par­tial imple­ment­a­tion. The func­tion­al­ity seems to ran­dom. Likely logic­al with­in Face­book’s struc­ture, but looks ran­dom from out here.

  33. Olivia Avatar
    Olivia

    You ROCK Brad — Thanks! xxx

  34. HT Avatar
    HT

    OttoBalles…you made my RSS work. Thanks!!

  35. Adrian De La Vega Avatar
    Adrian De La Vega

    Brad,

    I cant do it! if i change the “notifications.php” to “status.php” the browser cant load.…

    Here is.-

    feed://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=1232533715&viewer=1232533715&key=AWhmItiRnMmLQHp2&format=rss20

    What can ido???

    Thanx

  36. Cassie Ghrigsby Avatar
    Cassie Ghrigsby

    Hi Brad, looks like you are the go-to guy for Face­book-to-Twit­ter ques­tions! I have sucess­fully linked my Twit­ter account to my Face­book busi­ness page so that my status posts on my FB busi­ness page are also pos­ted on my Twit­ter page. How­ever when I post an Event on my FB busi­ness page, the “fb.me***” link that posts to Twit­ter is not cor­rect, the link only brings friends to the FB home page instead of to my Event link. Has any­one else had this prob­lem? Any suggestions?

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