Two of the world’s largest social networks, LinkedIn and Twitter, have just announced an end to their partnership that allowed users to sync updates from the two sites.
How Does This Affect Your LinkedIn-Twitter updates?
Athough not all users set their Twitter updates to automatically appear on LinkedIn, many use the hashtags LinkedIn provides to post selected tweets. Previously, LinkedIn users could connect their Twitter account, and then select the option that reads, "Share only tweets that contain #in or #li in your status updates." This way, Twitter users could carefully select which tweets they wanted published to their professional profile without ever having to go on LinkedIn itself. Users have now lost that ability, and must go straight to LinkedIn to post an update.
but there is a solution!
You can still post tweets to LinkedIn, you just need to use a third party social media management tool such as Hootsuite to do this. When you create a message on Hootsuite, you can then check the boxes of all the social media platform you want the message posted on. The message can be posted (as well as scheduled) on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even LinkedIn groups and company pages.
There is one drawback however. If your tweets include any shrunken links, LinkedIn will not display a snapshot of the article you are linking to, wheres it will if you post directly to LinkedIn.
Is the change such a bad idea?
I have noticed lately that people have been getting lazy and posting all their Twitter messages on LinkedIn. Whilst Twitter is more of a conversational tool, LinkedIn status updates are there to enhance your profile through sharing your expert knowledge and telling visitors what you’re up to. Updates that are full of twitter handles and hashtags are not very helpful to LinkedIn viewers (especially as many are not Twitter users).
By forcing users to post directly to LinkedIn, it will make you spend a bit more time thinking about what they have to say before posting an update, and the people this will benefit the most are your audience and ultimately you.
