LinkedIn is consistently evidenced as being the most beneficial professional network for those in the fields of technology ad technology PR. Twitter and LinkedIn have quickly established themselves as the core networking tools for businesses that want to create a social presence online. LinkedIn is also recognised as the essential network for business- to-business interactions.
If you are a LinkedIn member it is likely that towards the end of last week you will have received an email announcing that the integration between LinkedIn and Twitter is changing. The partnership between the two sites was ignited in 2009 when it became possible for users to directly link their two accounts, so as a Tweet was sent out it would update the users status in LinkedIn at the same time. The latest revision means that this partnership no longer exists in the same format; a tweet will not be automatically shared on LinkedIn. The good news is that you can still share LinkedIn updates with Twitter by checking the appropriate box on the post in LinkedIn.
The headlines from the technology-related posts reveal that it is the team at Twitter that decided to “break up” with LinkedIn. This is certainly the impression created in the blog post written by
Ryan Roslansky (Head of Content for LinkedIn) last Friday. Twitter is working hard to establish itself as a destination in its own right, the arrival of the Discovery tab and the customisation of the trending topics means that there is more incentive to spend time on the Twitter site.
There has been much debate in recent times about sharing the same message across different networks. Those who use Twitter prolifically could well be at risk of frustrating their LinkedIn connections. Many social media bloggers are heralding this latest development as a triumph and a forced cull of all the un-necessary tweets ruining the LinkedIn experience.
Looking at this news from a technology PR perspective what are the implications of this latest update? In order to stay in the mind of your clients and contacts you will want to be appearing in their news streams, the joined up tweeting was ensuring you stayed prominent not only on Twitter but also in LinkedIn. You were in effect establishing your voice in two places at the same time. It is still possible to do this but you will need to change your thinking and update both statuses from within LinkedIn now, remaining mindful of the 140 character Twitter limit.
The other option is to adopt the use of a social media management tool such a
Tweetdeck or
Hootsuite where you are able to publish the same message to more than one network at a time. Both these social media dashboards are free to use at a basic level and help you keep track of all aspects of your on-line business profile.
If you are using any social network there is great value in staying up to date with all the latest features and functionality, some of which are well publicised, others of which slip by almost unnoticed and unannounced. Did you spot that the blog link has been removed from company profiles? According to
The LinkedIn Man the network is updated every two to three days. It is therefore advisable for the purpose of PR to stay tuned into the relevant information.
