A closer look on the synchronization of LinkedIn & Twitter

The benefits of the cooperation

Two days ago, LinkedIn and Twitter announced their new cooperation; LinkedIn and Twitter go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Surely, I can see a lot of potential with this new cooperation. First, you remove the double work with posting the same information in both places. Second, while LinkedIn might be a more obvious place to announce work opportunities etc, the connection to twitter will send the request to more people.

The main thing about the cooperation I think lies in the party’s individual benefit from it. LinkedIn will most likely become more active from this cooperation and get significant increase in status updates. Twitter might get both more users from LinkedIn by people who just create an account to connect the two, since it now will not take any extra time to produce tweets. Since people tweet about all sort of things, Twitter might also increase the amount of tweets regarding business and professions. I cannot stop than wondering if an increased amount of tweets on these subjects would somehow be good for their financial growth.

The features of the synchronization

Anyway, even though there are benefits for both twitter and LinkedIn users. As well as for the two companies, still worry about what disadvantages that comes from this cooperation. Look at this for example:

As you can see, you can chose to share only some tweets or to share all of them. Setting that are made from the LinkedIn website but affects your status updates coming from twitter. While LinkedIn you have to check the square by the twitter logo to get your updates forwarded to Twitter.

It would be one thing if they only had the option to choose to connect the status updates on both networks for each post, like you can if you only share tweets with #in. However, as you can choice to have all tweets published on both networks I am worried that the increase number of updates on LinkedIn may be too much. People might become “spammed” on LinkedIn by others frequent twitter updates.

Changing the identity of the networks

From my point of view, the constant flow of twitter is what I expect from the network. The tweets I follow contain anything from links, to questions, to actions and of course answers of the questions “what are you doing right now?.” On LinkedIn, I do not expect this constant flow of updates, I expect people to update their statuses once or twice daily often less than that. The updates are more thought trough and gets to stay there status for a while. I have many contacts that overlap these networks and therefore expect my contact to use them differently. Thus depending on what I want to know about my contacts I chose which network to look up them on.

These identifying functions of networks it one of the reasons why I am on both of them, I have different expectations from them, and look for different things on them. If LinkedIn starts to become too much like twitter, why should I be on both networks?

Individual selection of the features

When people began synchronizing their twitter updates with their Facebook updates I found their updates to be more generic than the updates that they actually posted on Facebook. Thus, they changed the expectation of the Facebook update. Therefore, the possibility to hide particular updates solved this issue. Since, you no longer had to receive the synchronized posts, even though you might miss other updates then. A similar solution on LinkedIn would be very useful.

All in all, If LinkedIn gives us a possibility to hide the synchronized updates, I so far have nothing critical to say about the cooperation.

What do you think? Do you see more advantages? Or perhaps you have already seen threats? How has the cooperation affected you so far?

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