Twitter breaks up with LinkedIn. The beginning of the end of Twitter?

On Friday 30 June 2012, LinkedIn announced that Twitter no longer supports a full integration with their platform i.e. it’s no longer possible to update your LinkedIn status via Twitter. The idea behind this new strategy, according to Twitter, is about “delivering a consistent Twitter experience”. In other words, they want you to visit the Twitter.com website to read tweets so they can show adverts more often and monetize their platform better in the (near) future.

The rumor on the street is that Twitter didn’t need LinkedIn anymore to grow, as they have ‘only’ 160 Million members vs 500 Million accounts on Twitter. Remember, Twitter will keep a full API-integration with Facebook who have 900+ Million members…

Here’s the official news announcement from LinkedIn:

LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.

We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.

How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?
Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.

What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn?
Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

Personally I’m very pleased by this move and probably the best thing that could happen to LinkedIn. Too many people were automatically posting all tweets to LinkedIn Status Updates, which lead to too much noise. The good news, we are not seeing anymore more irrelevant messages about football or what’s cooking!

I think Twitter made a big mistake with this strategic move as it will remain possible to send out tweets by updating your LinkedIn status. And I believe that people will switch, just like I did one year ago. In the beginning (2009), I started using Twitter just to update all my social networks; Hyves, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook, etcetera. It became fast my first point of entry to update these social networks, much supported by tools as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.com. Today, Facebook has become my premier social network to keep in touch with my friends, family and business network. Twitter has become an end station which I don’t visit that often anymore (note: I never visited Twitter.com anyway but only used their mobile app or tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite).

I guess more people will adopt this way of working and Twitter becomes an island in the social media landscape, a ghost town only controlled by tweet robots. What do you think?

Tip: If you want to continue using the hashtag #in for posting selected tweets directly to LinkedIn, you may want to use IFTT (IF This Then That) where you can simply automate this.

About Jacco Valkenburg

Jacco Valkenburg is an international recruitment expert, trainer and author (5 books). He has more than 20 years experience in global recruitment strategies and execution spanning numerous countries for leading companies. As founder of Recruiter University and Recruit2 he provides companies with recruitment training and consultancy. His mission is helping companies ‘from good to great staffing’.

1 Comment

  1. I have to say that Twitter has been far more valuable to me in terms of networking than LinkedIn. I also receive far more personal responses to questions posted on Twitter than I do with LinkedIn. I use Twitter in much the same way as you use Facebook, by the sounds of it, as I do not use Facebook. LinkedIn is much more serious for me, where I follow firms I have worked with or want to work with in the future. Twitter is a place for me to build my freelance contacts, talk to sportspeople, journalists and other writers and read instructive blogs (like this one). I would hate to see that change, as Twitter, to all intents and purposes, is my Facebook.