LinkedIn Nov. 10 agreed to let its users tweet their status to Twitter and to their LinkedIn connections. Status updates have been an important part of LinkedIn, with working professionals using it to alert others to sales leads, new jobs and other business opportunities. Twitter is the king of the status update, with millions of users blasting out 140 messages to followers each day. LinkedIn may be the leading social networking for professionals, but it's membership growth has cooled in the last two years. Meanwhile, Facebook has soared to more 300 million users, sparking speculation that many people have turned to the leading social network for their personal and professional connections.
LinkedIn Nov. 10 agreed to add Twitter's tweeting capability to its network
of 50 million business professionals in a deal for which financial terms were
not made public.
Soon LinkedIn users will be able to tweet their status to Twitter and to
their LinkedIn connections, broadcasting what's going on with them.
Status updates have been an important part of LinkedIn, with working
professionals using it to alert others to sales leads, new jobs and other
business opportunities. Twitter is the king of the status update, with millions
of users blasting out 140 messages to followers each day.
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Users will join their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts by checking the Twitter
box under the Network Updates box on their LinkedIn homepage and following the
prompts.
Users will be able to specify the Twitter account that they'd like to sync
and display on their LinkedIn profile. Users can then check a box to share all
of their tweets, or just select tweets marked by #li or #in hashtags on
LinkedIn as a status update.
"As a professional online and in the real world, you'll often find
articles or think of ideas that would be useful to share with your Twitter
followers and your LinkedIn connections," said Allen Blue, vice president of product strategy at LinkedIn,
which he also co-founded. "It's about sparking interesting conversations.
Now you can share from anywhere."
LinkedIn is the leading social networking for professionals,
growing to 50 million users in over 200 countries since its inception in May
2003. However, Facebook has soared to more 300 million users since it launched
in Februrary 2004, sparking speculation that many people have turned to the
leading social network for their personal and professional connections.
LinkedIn's application development platform, so promising when it was launched one year ago, also seems to be floundering.
Can enabling Twitter tweets revitalize LinkedIn?
The LinkedIn-Twitter deals comes two three weeks after Microsoft and Google agreed to index Twitter tweets to make them easily search
able on Google search and Microsoft Bing.
No financial details were announced for those deals either, but Twitter
could be incurring some nice, new revenue streams by opening up its data feed
to the search and enterprise social networking powers. Twitter this summerbanked a reported $100 funding round, so the company is clearly
not hurting for cash.
But the company has been slow to make its business model clear, and
investors will eventually want to see some return-on-investment bang for their
bucks. Twitter has yet to spell out the company's plans to make money.
Looked at another way, Twitter's investors would not have pumped so much
money into the business if they weren't confident in its ability to cultivate
revenue streams. And what of those thus far shadowy revenue streams?
Advertising and analytics as part of a so-called Twitter Pro service are
expected.
Meanwhile, the company's innovation has picked up of late. Twitter recently released a promising new feature called Lists to let users
curate groups of users they wish to follow, or have followed by others.
Editor's note: This story was updated with revised information about
LinkedIn's global membership.
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