Twitter and LinkedIn fallout breaks your automation

With the news last week of Twitter and LinkedIn’s fallout and unwillingness to share updates across networks, you may need to rethink your automation set up and how you currently share news across multiple networks.Social media can be a total time-drain, and it is always a fine line between what your followers will and won’t accept in terms of automating your presence on networks.

It was possible to auto-feed all of your tweets through your LinkedIn profile, which may or may not have annoyed you dependent on the quality of those tweets. One thing that may have been more tolerated was the ability to add your Twitter updates to LinkedIn by adding in the #in or #li hashtags to your tweet, which meant it was shared onto LinkedIn as you posted on Twitter.

To me, this was a useful feature, allowing you to specify what you were sharing on a tweet-by-tweet basis, rather than automatically sharing all your tweets, some of which may not have been suitable for the more business-focused LinkedIn site. It fell into my category of acceptable automation in order to save time spent.

Now if you want to share between Twitter and LinkedIn, you need to start on LinkedIn and check the Twitter share box so that both networks will see the update at the same time. As I spend more time on Twitter than LinkedIn, that feels counter-intuitive to me, and although Twitter started the rift people who are more used to posting LinkedIn to Twitter may consequently spend less time on Twitter to their and their advertisers’ loss – exactly what they are trying to prevent.

How do you feel about this change? Will it make for a clutter-free LinkedIn when people stop tweeting all sorts and number of updates automatically, or will it make LinkedIn a less interactive platform?

Whatever you think, you need to be aware of this change, and alter your behaviour according to what results you are looking for. It is also a timely reminder that you need to review your strategy and activity on a regular basis, and take network changes into account when you are planning your time, tactics and approach.