I started this post over a month a ago, but decided to stop trying to solve my problems with connecting Twitter to Facebook so I could finish the book. Today, I released the book and wanted to tweet about it. I worked all evening to find a solution and still my tweets from the Jane V. Blanchard author twitter account do not show up on the Jane V. Blanchard author FB page. I have no problems tweeting from my personal account to the FB one or with the Women of the Way accounts, just the author ones. If any of you have a solution, I would love to try it. There is some sort of log-in to FB problem; even using different browsers does not help.
I am not a neophyte to the Web. I joined Facebook on September 29, 2007. Over the years, I have had various on-line journals and managed several simple Websites for various organizations. Since I regularly comment on blogs, some of my friends consider me Web savvy; in reality, I know just enough to cause hours of frustration and wasted effort.
My first mistake was not understanding the differences between a group page and a fan page. I wrote about that pitfall and the work needed to extricate myself from that error in my blog There is so much more to writing a book than I imagined.
After developing the Web page for the book, I had a personal Facebook page, a Women of the Way Fan page, and a Women of the Way blog. I started blogging and using social media to cross-promote. Since I had everything pointing to each other, all the post were doubled or tripled. More wasted time. See my post Untangling the weave of social networks can leave one frazzled.
Another mistake was in not understanding the importance of separating the personal me from the public me, and the author from the book. This error was difficult to correct, taking more that a week’s time with much hair pulling and yelling at the computer as it disallowed my proposed changes. See my post Yikes! My identity crisis resulted in the three faces of Jane: the personal, the public, and the book.
Then, when I thought I had everything correct, I posted from this blog and it went nowhere. The heading did not tweet. Facebook did not updated. In frustration, I pulled out big patches of hair from the back of my head…
Apparently, when I switched from WordPress .com to WordPress.org I lost the ability to publicize my post. After researching, I found two applications, one for Facebook and another for Twitter. I started with the plugin, Simple-Facebook-Connect, which was far too complex for me, requiring application development skills. I tried the Add Link to Facebook plugin, which required my getting an app ID and app secret. Getting those was tricky because either the tutorial skipped information or the app had been revised and no longer matched the tutorial. At last, I got the app to work, but on my personal page, not on the Jane V. Blanchard, author fan page, where I wanted it. I checked the forums and many people where looking for a solution. I cannot understand why the wordpress.com is so different from the workpress.org. Why is it so difficult to integrate social networks with a blog? I then tried Social by MailChimp. With it, I had two tweets, and a posting on the personal Facebook, not on my fan page. Lordy, lordy!
