Update your status anytime to Facebook and Twitter with SMS

No doubt at all, Facebook and Twitter have grown rapidly since they were out. If you haven’t already heard of them, Facebook is a Global Social Networking website; you can share your most recent update, photos, videos, stories and many more to anyone who is authorized to see you personal status. Basically with Facebook, you can know what your friends are doing once they post out stuffs. Who still need to email photos? With Twitter, a microblog for everyone, it’s a total different story. Twitter allows user to update their own status within 140 letters for each post. Yes, post only, no video, no photos, no farming game.

I have been a Facebook user for more two years and I really enjoy the way I could interact with some of my friends even we are distant from each other. Not many often, but I do use Facebook to post my personal update whenever I feel like to. For Twitter, I would say “I never used it and I never would.” until today.

I could see more and more of the companies are doing their marketing through Facebook and Twitter besides what they have already done on their own sites. So if you want to broadcast your business out, these two online service are really good choices.

Personally speaking, I don’t use Twitter at all and not so much Facebook neither because I can’t access to internet all the time. By the time I could, I’d probably forget what I wanted to post already. Good that for both of Facebook and Twitter, they give their users the option to use SMS to update their status.

First, let me explain how it works. No matter you sign up for a text message service for your cell phone plan, your cell phone service SHOULD be able to send out and receive text message (if you don’t have a proper plan, of course it’s subject to text message fee. With my carrier, it’s 0.15 CAD/each.) Once you link your cell phone number up with your Facebook and/or Twitter account, you can send message to a number. Once Facebook and Twitter at their sides receive this message and see it’s from your cell phone, they will verify your phone number that’s linked to your account. Once this is done, their system will automatically post it up.

-Just a note that, this way of updating your Facebook and/or Twitter is treated as regular SMS service and not those premium data service like MSN chat on phone. Also I must point out that not all wireless phone service carrier will work with Facebook and Twitter service, for more general inquiries, you can talk to Facebook and Twitter customer service to double check. For myself, I am using Fido in Canada as my phone carrier.

For Facebook

• How to sign up

First, you will need to login your facebook account. One your top right of the page, you could see the following setting:

Just click on “Account Settings“, then you will see different categories of setting. What you need to do is click on the “Mobile” tab. Then you can type in your cell phone number and confirm. Facebook lists my phone as Rogers even though mine is actually Fido, but who cares, they are basically the same company. Just two seconds later, you will receive a SMS that’s containing a PIN, you will need to key in this PIN into Facebook and verify this is you phone. Once this is Done, you are set up and ready to go.

• How to post

It’s very easy to update my Facebook status now. All I need to do is send a SMS to 32665 (“FBOOK”) and I will see my update on my Facebook account right away.

For Twitter

• How to sign up

Setting up Twitter with my phone takes a bit longer. Twitter offers the same method we used with Facebook, but I don’t know why I never received a PIN number that I can key on to my setting and finish the setup. After a couple trials, I gave up on this method and found another way to achieve what I needed to do.

Referring to Twitter’s official site:

Short codes for 2-way Twitter SMS:
In the US, use 40404.
In Canada, use 21212.
In the UK, use 86444 (we currently only support Vodafone and O2)
In New Zealand, use 8987
In India, use 53000 (we currently only support Bharti Airtel)

In Indonesia use, 89887 (We currently support AXIS)

Long codes for 1-way Twitter SMS:

+44 7624 801423
+46 737 494222
+49 17 6888 50505

Since I am located in Canada, so I just use my phone to send “START” to 21212, I received a reply right away:

Welcome to Twitter! Reply with SIGNUP to begin.

Already on witter? Reply with your ‘USERNAME’ instead.

(Std msg rates apply. Reply with HELP for more)

Yes, I already created my Twitter account online, so I reply with my username, then I received instruction again:

Hi, ?(My username), Reply w/ your password to Tweet on this phone.

(Passwords are Case Sensitive!! Your phone may capitalize the 1st letter of your pwd)

Then I replied with my password. Since I am using iPhone, the first letter was capitalized, so I have to correct it before I sent it out. Once I have done that, I received the following message:

Your password is correct!

Reply w/ OK to confim you want to use Twitter with this phone.

So I sent “OK” back. For the instruction, I received the last SMS that says:

Your password is correct!

You’re all set up to use Twitter with this phone. Type a Tweet anytime, just send it to this number.

• How to post

OK, now my Twitter account is linked to my phone. Just referring back to the number for Canada, it’s 21212, so now whenever I send message to this number, my Twitter page will display the post. Just note that, Twitter is a microblog, it’s limited to 140 letters (including space) which is the same as cell phone SMS. If you phone shows that your message is cut to two parts because it’s too long, then you might want to cut out some words that are not necessary.

Post note:

Because my plan with Fido includes unlimited local text message, I can update my Facebook and Twitter status whenever I want with my cell phone SMS. The good thing about SMS update is that your status update is real time and I am not required to have internet access. However, it’s only limited to text update; if i would like to share some photos, my SMS update won’t help me at all.

For those who has data as in part of their cell phone plan, you can just ignore this post because you can just visit the mobile pages of Facebook and Twitter to update your status. You can do that easier especially you own an iPhone that you could download the app for Facebook and Twitter.

One last thing I would like to kindly remind those who doesn’t have appropriate local text message plan, please don’t use it too much or else your monthly bill might give you heart attack (just joking, ); you sure don’t want that happen. If you are not sure, call your service provider and double check.

Happy sharing and connecting with others.