Love that you ask.
The story so far: You received an email from LinkedIn. It said you could:
1. Make your Twitter account visible on your profile
2. Use #in or #li to share posts from Twitter to your LinkedIn status
3. Add the Tweets app to share your Twitter activity on your profile
So this is an aggregator. A short time ago, Facebook started enabling users to automatically have their Facebook status updates post to their Twitter accounts. LinkedIn is offering this feature. Aggregators are good.
But are they always? The LinkedIn application goes both ways, i.e. when you post on Twitter, your LinkedIn status gets updated.
If you ever hear me speak, you’ll probably hear me talk about culture and social capital. Social capital is the currency of social networks. Behaving inconsistently with the culture of the network begets a social capital deficit.
I can’t imagine everyone who has an opinion on this feels the same way, and certainly it depends at least somewhat on your goals, your use of the tool, your desires for your personal brand, but here’s where this might be a round peg in a square hole.
The cultures of the two networks are not totally compatible. LinkedIn is the office. It’s all about work. It’s like a business meeting. When you post a status update, you’re delivering a report. For example, at this writing, the most recent status update on my LinkedIn news feed reads that my friend Doug Griess, attorney, is, “Doing a CLE re IP licensing issues.”
Harumph, yes, but absolutely what is expected on a LinkedIn status update. Doug earns a little social capital.
Twitter is where we go when we leave the office. We talk shop, sure, but we have opinions about it. Compared to the stoic structure of LinkedIn, Twitter is an unpredictable crowded bar with many voices talking about any number of disonnected topics.
Many of us “tweet” and “re-tweet” with great frequency, or several at a time. The content of these posts may be opinion, more social than business, an “@” reply, etc. We’re not accustomed to seeing this on LinkedIn. Chances are, we’re connected and visible to professionals who use LinkedIn exclusively because they don’t appreciate the hieroglyphics and glib chatter they find on Twitter. A quick check of my “All Friends” feed on TweetDeck gives me the opportunity to learn about, “mind blowing hyperrealistic structures,” and tells me, “puppys (sic.) are cute,” and, “I love this video!” The presence of any of these in a LinkedIn status update will cost the author social capital. (The presence of these in my Twitter feed tells me I need to make time for housekeeping…)
If you do link the two accounts, I strongly recommend taking the option to post only the “tweets” that you tag with “#in” or “#li.” If you don’t have a grip on hashtags, here’s a nice primer. If the term “hashtag” is foreign to you vis-a-vis Twitter, I recommend passing on linking Twitter and LinkedIn.
I do think LinkedIn is to be commended for giving this a shot. For some, this will be a nice time saver and may allow a few to dip a toe into Twitter.
I also offer kudos to LinkedIn for providing a 1:1 communication to all users and introducing this change as an option. In this way it has shown itself to be more in tune with customer service and the expectations of its membership base than a certain other Internet social network that shall remain nameless here but whose name may rhyme with, “space hook.”
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