If you had previously connected your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and relied on Tweets to populate your LinkedIn statuses, you have probably already noticed (or read the LinkedIn email informing you) that after two years, Twitter has cut the cord and Tweets no longer appear on LinkedIn. (Previously, you could easily set up your accounts to do this.)

Since the end of June, the stream of LinkedIn status updates have been remarkably free of @.  (That is, except mentions of those people — and you know who you are — who still have an email address in their “name” box as an open invitation for anyone to connect to you. FYI – it is against LinkedIn policy and not a practice that I encourage*.)  Admittedly, the LinkedIn stream full of Tweets was confusing.  There were lots of partial conversations and # and @ symbols for the Twitter-savvy.  There were also lots of personal comments and conversations that had little to do with LinkedIn’s heavy business, professional and career focus.

For those sales people, recruiters, business development professionals and other B2B marketers who had linked their professional Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles, the “divorce” of Twitter and LinkedIn was a heavy blow.  They lost the ability to easily post professional news on both LinkedIn and Twitter.  Yes, I know we can post from LinkedIn to Twitter but the lack of the character countdown on LinkedIn’s web page makes it a little bit harder.  (The LinkedIn mobile app does count down the characters for you.)  Also, if you are a social media-savvy event goer, you know you have to work in Twitter to identify other people who are attending the same event to be able to participate in event back channel chatter.

Upon hearing the news – we immediately looked into what mobile Twitter client could be used to connect Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Tweetdeck only seems to manage Twitter and Facebook.  Anything coming up I should know about?
•  Hootsuite‘s mobile description talks about “viewing your LinkedIn connections’ activity” which doesn’t bode well for actually posting on LinkedIn via the app.
• We’ve tested Seesmic Ping and while it works just fine for posting on both LinkedIn and Twitter (some issue with symbols notwithstanding) it doesn’t allow you to search the stream for a hashtag like you would need to do to keep track of who is at an event and what they are saying.
• Other tools, like Echofon, (a simple Twitter client which was sufficient when Twitter and LinkedIn were happily married) obviously aren’t going to do the trick for LinkedIn statuses.
• LinkedIn’s own mobile app sends updates to Twitter if you check off “the birdie box” – it also contains the handy character counter missing on the website.  It won’t help you find other Twitter users at an event but a multi-interface approach might work. Turn on the notifications on the Twitter client (so you see them pop up onscreen) and make sure you use the event hashtag when you push LinkedIn updates through to Twitter.

I’m waiting for some smart mobile developer to create a tool that posts to and monitors both Twitter and LinkedIn – but make sure you “deliver a consistent Twitter experience“.

Or, maybe I have missed some obvious solution.

A few more pieces of post-apocalyptic Twitter and LinkedIn advice:

• Linking any two different social networks is problematic – make sure you know what, why and to whom you are communicating — also remember where you have automatic connections.  (I know I’ve annoyed the heck out of my Facebook friends when I forget to de-couple before live-tweeting an event I am attending. I also sometimes Tweet and Facebook from FourSquare, duplicating my post there when Twitter and Facebook are coupled.)
• What’s your social media communication strategy overall?  Look at the different audiences found on LinkedIn and Twitter.  Decide if you really do want these audiences to see the same message.
• We use Web-based GaggleAMP for select Mass Innovation Nights tweets, LinkedIn updates and Facebook posts.  Each message is a separate message (although you can have identical messages going to LinkedIn and Twitter) that gets perpetuated by your “Gaggle” – the group of friends and followers who have signed up to be notified when you are sending out a message.
• Time to start paying serious attention to what is in the stream of LinkedIn updates.  Now that it is free of Twitter musings, it might be once again a place to glean real business insight.

 

*For those of you with long memories, yes, long ago I briefly did have an email in my LinkedIn name box.  There was a time when I changed jobs and email addresses, and started using a different name.