LinkedIn Tweets App Lets Users Find, Follow Contacts on Twitter

LinkedIn May 26 added a feature to its Tweets application that lets users track their LinkedIn connections on Twitter as well.

LinkedIn began letting users tweet to Twitter from LinkedIn and vice versa in November 2009 through Tweets, which has been picked up by more than 1 million users.

The new find/follow feature is represented by a new Tweets tab titled “Connections,” which Tweets users may click to see all of their LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles.

From here, users can view all of the Twitter information from their connections and read a snippet of a connection’s last tweet by letting the cursor hover over that person’s Twitter ID. Users may also follow or unfollow these connections.

Adam Nash, vice president of search and platform products at LinkedIn, said letting users track their connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter meets “one of the most common requests” LinkedIn members make, which is for “help finding relevant professionals to follow on Twitter.”

The tool should be handy for LinkedIn social network members who have added their Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles. Now the company only needs more users to install the application and use it; 1 million users out of more than 50 million total LinkedIn members is not a remarkable figure.

There are other user experience perks in Tweets. The Tweets Overview tab has been augmented to help users find everyone they follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feeds and tweet from their own accounts.

LinkedIn added the Connections to Follow section to recommend new people to follow. Recommendations are based on existing LinkedIn connections.

Tweets users may also save their LinkedIn connections as a Twitter list, which LinkedIn will automatically keep fresh, “adding and removing Twitter accounts to [and from] the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections,” Nash said.

The new features are clearly geared to entice more users to install the application, which may be installed easily in just a few clicks here by providing LinkedIn with a Twitter user ID. However, it can take 5 minutes for Tweets to find and recognize a user’s Twitter account.

Tweets is also accessible from anywhere on LinkedIn using the More menu at the top of the Website.

The Tweets application is important because it opens up the potential for LinkedIn to reach some of Twitter’s user base of 100 million people. Moreover, Twitter feed integrations also exist between Twitter and Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft and Twitter and Google.

LinkedIn can’t afford to be left out of this social feed integration party.