Role Play: Connecting Facebook and Tumblr
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
Role players are by nature social. They just aren’t social as themselves. At any given time, you’ll find dozens, hundreds and maybe even thousands of us socializing online via, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr,Posterous, WordPress, Second Life or a myriad of MMORPGs and social games like World of Warcraft or Everquest.
Role players have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. The social networking behemoth regularly culls role player accounts leaving RPers with little choice besides creating a Facebook fan page for their character if they want to remain on FB. It’s difficult, however to trust a platform after it has zapped your account. One way to protect yourself is to mirror your role play one two platforms, say for instance, Facebook and Tumblr.
If you aren’t familiar with Tumblr, it is a very user-friendly short blogging platform. After setting up your first blog (we suggest something general, even generic because at this time all your favorites and follows will run through that first user), you can set up as many individual blogs for your characters, events or fandoms that you want. Best of all, if you have created a Facebook fan page for your character, you can connect Tumblr and Facebook so you have an automatic record of your RP.
To connect your Tumblr to your Facebook page, launch Tumblr and open the dashboard for the character blog If you only have one Tumblog, this is the dashboard. if you have multiple Tumblrs, select the name of the blog you want to connect to Facebook from the list at the top of your general dashboard. Then select Blog Settings in the righthand column.
Scroll down until you find the Facebook section. Click the button to sign in with Facebook. You’ll need to sign in with you real account, however, once you’ve done that you can choose to cross-post stuff from your character Tumblr and you character Fan Page. Just select the right fan page for the blog from the drop down list which should contain all the fan pages related to your RL Facebook account. Be sure the Share post on your Timeline box is checked if you want to automatically share Tumblr posts on your Facebook fan Page.
Tumblr says you can toggle the post to Feature on and off when you post something to Tumblr. There is a Send to Facebook check box in the right hand column of the Tumblr posting page. Simply remove the check and the post will not be cross posted to Facebook.
It’s that easy. RPing on Tumblr and just having your post automatically added to you timeline might not protect you from having your account disabled if it isn’t a fan page. But at least your friends will have a means of finding you. and who knows, you may just decide Tumblr is a good alternative to role playing on Facebook.
Do you have a Tumblog? Let us know so we can follow you!
Written by Jay C. Hammond.