Although the fact that Twitter cut LinkedIn loose, meaning that Twitter does not allow Twitter feeds to appear in a LinkedIn page widget anymore is not new news, but the fact that LinkedIn has leveraged this into its own success story is new news.
This article gives a very insightful view of the blunder that Twitter has made in breaking up with LinkedIn. By disavowing their relationship Twitter has encouraged LinkedIn to pursue its own course in direct competition with Twitter.
“Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.
What LinkedIn then did was to encourage use of their own newsfeed and nicely integrated it with HootSuite and easy sharing sites. Now for business people the LinkedIn newsfeed may actually be more meaningful for them than a Twitter feed.
This was a very foolish shortsighted decision on Twitter’s part. If they had stayed the course they could have expanded into the business market and created a very nice partnership with LinkedIn. My feeling is that in the long run, business people may leave Twitter totally to the spammers and ads and move full throttle over to LinkedIn now that they have a full social and interaction platform.
If you are not posting updates to LinkedIn, now’s the time to give that some consideration and review our LinkedIn update services.