San Francisco — Twitter continues to spread its wings across the Web. Twitter’s spree of associations is not ending anytime soon. Late last month, Microsoft and Twitter made an alliance to integrate Twitter within Bing. On Tuesday, Twitter and LinkedIn announced a new partnership to bring tweets to LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals. Starting immediately, users of LinkedIn and Twitter can cross-file to each other’s services, by checking a box on either Twitter or LinkedIn.
The is move aimed at the growing base of business users who take advantage of social networking sites. LinkedIn, with more than 50 million members, is the largest network of professionals around the globe who post information about themselves, such as resumes, to help find jobs or employees, and to stay in touch with each other.
Twitter, meanwhile, has become a favorite social site for brands, marketers and self promoters. Twitter enables people to send short messages up to 140 characters to subscribers, who are called “followers.”
LinkedIn also has an update box, which happens to be 140 characters.
The new capabilities, which will be rolled out overnight, would enable you to cross-post to both networks. From the LinkedIn side, there is a Twitter Settings panel that lets you to connect your accounts and choose whether your Twitter account appears on your profile. There is also now a special box that you can check to tell LinkedIn whether you want to tweet out specific status updates:
The consolidation on the Twitter side is even more interesting. In your settings, you can connect your LinkedIn account to your Twitter and then choose whether you want to share all of your tweets on LinkedIn OR just specific ones by using one of two hashtags: #li or #in.
This is exactly like the Selective Twitter Status Facebook app, which updates your Facebook with the #fb hashtag. The difference this time is that Twitter officially supports the #li and #in hashtags for auto-updating LinkedIn:
The Future of the Twitter and LinkedIn Partnership
Allen Blue, a co-founder of Twitter who is also its vice president of product strategy, said LinkedIn members would be able to automatically post recent Tweets if they wanted.
Blue said users will have the option of sending only selected materials to Twitter.
The partnership makes a good bit of sense, and could prove useful. The association affirms Twitter’s role as a network for professional conversation. Now, if an employer seeking to fill an open position, posting the job opening to LinkedIn might be the obvious move. But sharing it on Twitter and getting it re-Tweeted as well could increase the likelihood of the right set of eyes seeing the post.
“Twitter is not only a massively open platform, but also it is a place where there is an enormous amount of professional information already being circulated, and we wanted to be sure that was coming to our LinkedIn user base,” said Blue.
And for Twitter users who are keen to share articles, reports and job postings with their circle of contacts, broadcasting Tweets to a network of LinkedIn users simply amplifies the message.
Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, said that he wants LinkedIn to be the hub for all professional conversation. Integrating tweets into LinkedIn will help them find a home where they will become part of someone’s professional identity, and conversations will develop around them, he said.
In a video below, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone compared the collaboration to the scrumptious combination of peanut butter and chocolate. That is a tasty pairing indeed, but it is not the most ubiquitous combo. Aside from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Reese’s Pieces, and the odd cookie or slice of cake, the two flavors do not often mix.
But perhaps Syncing LinkedIn and Twitter would not make good sense for everyone. But for the devotedly social business user, the combination could prove addictive.