LinkedIn has jumped into the integration fray the past few weeks. Most recently the business network site has integrated with Twitter to allow posting between the two sites. This is a big step for LinkedIn since the status feature of the site was poorly used in the past. Many users rarely updated it and status feeds were stagnant.
Now LinkedIn will allow you to post your status to your Twitter account and vice-versa. Twitter now allows posts with #in or #li hashtags to post to LinkedIn accounts. Users have to verify and allow the permissions, much like the selective Twitter status tool that allows Twitter posts to be posted to Facebook using hashtag #fb. Just for giggles I did a test the other day posting from LinkedIn with the Twitter post enabled and added the #fb hashtag to see if it would populate all the sites. Sure enough it did.
I see both good news and bad news with this upgrade. Good news is that LinkedIn statuses are now being updated more often and therefore more relevant to what’s happening now. Bad news is that more random junk may creep into your LinkedIn page and take away from the core professional and business feel to LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn because it’s focused on business related information; Twitter chatter just mucks it all up.
Also this touches on the subject of what I like to call “cross-pollination” of social networks. Aggregators like FriendFeed and Cliqset allow users to combine all their social network activity into a single stream. But if the stream becomes repetitive in that the same post appears several times is this a good thing? I found the same to be true when using autoposting services like Posterous. My Facebook page would get the same update several times, one from Twitter, one from YouTube, one from Flickr, etc.
Other social network sites are also seeing the value of Twitter integration. Delicious recently added an email and Twitter integration for its bookmarking tools. Users can easily disable the feature by deleting the Twitter address in the “send to” field or marking the bookmark as private. However I have recently created corporate accounts for Delicious for team members to share articles and websites and have to educate the team on what to share and what to keep private. More on that in a future blog post on Delicious.
What do you think about Twitter integration with LinkedIn? Do you think it enhances or takes away from LinkedIn?
