You may have heard the phrase “Kill two birds with one stone”, regarding taking one action to produce two results. Twitter and Facebook have teamed up to create a highway directly to one another, allowing users to update one status and be published to both sites. Most people are aware of how you can have your Twitter updates post to your Facebook status. Some people know that you can hide people who spam your stream, but not many know you can post your Facebook statuses to Twitter.

Would you like to talk about efficiency? This productive measure comes at no cost, sending your statuses via fiber optics at “status per 100 milliseconds”. The highway is perfect for users with high social networking priority that would like to save time and have more flexibility.

One AWESOME example:

You may have Facebook mobile, but you do not receive status updates via text message. This is where Twitter has an upper hand; those subscribed to a “tweeter” via mobile device will now be notified of posted Facebook status. This is a win-win situation, because this highway has two lanes and can also travel the opposite direction. For example, you text your tweet to the designated number registered with your phone, and it shows up as your Facebook status aswell. This is perfect for non-internet browsing mobile devices.

Looking for customization? Feel free to share everything between Facebook and Twitter, but lucky for us picky folks you can choose what information you would like to share. You have options to share status updates, links, photos, notes, and event creations. Statuses and updates via Facebook and Twitter are very important to keep your friends, clients, fans, and coworkers informed. Hop online and buckle up (for safety), because you’re about to experience the smoothest and fastest ride social media has to offer.

Businesses can benefit from this, too. Online sites like BidFire, a Real-time auction website like eBay, are primed  for these quick transactions. Twitter allows access to their APIs that can be used to post messages when a user does something Like buy a Nintendo Wii for $10, which then can be automatically posted to Facebook with a neat URL to your website. When users link to their social network accounts, you can dramatically increase visibility just by simply offering a way for people to tell what a great deal they received. People like to brag to their friends, so why not tap into that?

A few days ago, I posted a Facebook status message, asking “Who wants a free SEO analysis?” 23 people responded and I chose one winner. Yesterday, I chose the winner and posted the analysis here.  And now, not even a day later, I do a search on Twitter and see pages and pages of people re-tweeting the blog post.

Funny thing is that I never promoted this on twitter to begin with. It started from just a Facebook status message and then a post of my blog.

You should search on your name to see what comes up.

You might be surprised.
You might learn something.

For example, look at who is mentioning me by typing this:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=dennis%20yu

Given the popularity, I think I’ll probably offer on free SEO analysis weekly. If you want one, just fan me on Facebook at facebook.com/dennisyu, then add your site to the list.

Update:

I now do a search on my name on twitter every few days to see what’s happening.  Now I see 100 mentions every time I do a blog post, even though I don’t mention it on twitter.  That means bloggers like us have to pay attention to twitter whether we like it or not.  At conferences, we get to see the live twitter feeds to get a sense of audience interest.  Quite lively!

A guest post by Adam Sachs, co-founder of Ignighter, a group dating site with great relationship advice and a fun place to work

I’m Adam Sachs and I run the world’s largest group dating site. Since our initial launch as a Facebook Application in January 2008 and subsequent relaunch as a destination site in August 2008, we’ve amassed a significant inventory of group daters using our free service.

However, if you’re simply growing a free user base at a steady, continuous pace (read: you haven’t detonated a viral bomb like only the Facebooks and Twitters of the Internet have) then after a while, the free model starts to seem unsustainable. Acquiring new users on a free site has a cost. User acquisition could be costing you money (PPC ads, live sponsored events) or even just costing you time (Commenting on blogs, marketing via Twitter). But until you can establish a lifetime value for a new user, then you are simply shelling out for marketing while seeing a virtually nonexistent ROI.

With no ROI and no value associated with each user who registers for your site, it’s only a matter of time before you run out of money, time, and the ability to keep acquiring them. Your investors probably won’t be too happy either.

It’s taken Ignighter a while to come to this realization, but now that we have, we are beginning to experiment with incorporating paid functionality into the website. Introducing a paid model to Ignighter doesn’t just benefit the company however; we predict it will benefit our user base as well.

Below are a few Pros and Cons that we predict to encounter when transitioning from a free to paid service. We can revisit these pros and cons in a few months and see how accurate they proved to be.

Pros: Money is finally coming IN the door.

1. Money means more users. If you are making more per user than you are paying to acquire them, then the goal is to spend as much money as possible to acquire them. I’d pay $25 to get $35 back, wouldn’t you?
2. Money means better users. When you offer a free service, you get registrations from people of drastically varying levels of interest and relevance to your site. When people on the not-so-interested-in-meeting-new-people-but-it’s-free-so-I’ll-try-it-anyway end of the spectrum register, they’re actually adding what we affectionately call “shit inventory” to the site and hurting the experience of the registered users who want to use the site for its intended purpose.

Incorporating a paid level will naturally introduce a tiered system of usership to the site, facilitating an experience that groups users based on their intentions and expectations. Asking people to pay will also help to make your users more passionate about the company. Paid users will now be part of a community that they’ve invested in and helped to create.

Money means happy investors. This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Cons: It’s not so easy

1. It’s not so easy to convince someone to be one of the first to pay for your service. Before you can establish a track record of value that you’re providing to the user it can seem like you’re asking them to pay taste-tester to the King of Zamunda.
2. It’s not so easy to build the damn thing. At Ignighter this fundamental shift is requiring a ton of web development and business development resources. This kind of thing can’t be half-assed, you have to give it your full attention and planning.
3. It’s not so easy to accept that it’s going to work beyond a shadow of a doubt. But isn’t that what startups are all about?