May 24, 2010 80 Comments

Keep LinkedIn Clean

In my last post, I talked about making sure we Use LinkedIn Effectively. Here’s something else to think about: stop importing your Twitter feed into LinkedIn indiscriminately. If LinkedIn is meant for business networking, what do you think these updates (pulled at random) are doing to help your business?

linkedin chatter

Let’s see, we have:
A quote – shows you can copy and paste (okay, and a little bit of where your head is).
A link – this one’s actually pretty good, as it leads me somewhere, but it’s a request for help with a contest. (still okay)
News talk
Sports talk
Location talk – which is good for finding potential business meetings.
Software talk (?)
Another quote
Um… wtf?
And a retweet of a retweet of a quote.

Business Value

There’s nearly no business value in any of those items listed above (I’ll give Lewis a pass for his location quote). As someone using LinkedIn for business networking, what do you think others see when they read those bits of information? Do you think they’re at the desk, thinking, “Wow. Now THIS is actionable. I’m going to get a little deeper with this person right now.”

I’m going with no.

Use LinkedIn for Business Status

Now, what does that mean? Advertise? No. Maybe it’s a mix of uses. Here are a few I put out there over the last few days:

LinkedIn Status

In one, I ask a question about using LinkedIn for networking. It gets 27 comments (which isn’t bad, but also tells me that people certainly had some thoughts about the topic, so I make a note to blog more about this). In the one before that, I make a direct request for folks to subscribe to my blog. This is partially because I just added a bunch of new connections on LinkedIn, so I want to be sure to invite them into my primary property (my home base).

But in all cases, anything I put across that status message is something that pertains to my business interests in one way or another.

Keep The Stream Valuable

Frankly, what I can see happening in short notice is that people might choose to unlink from you to clean up their status stream. So, you might even be risking network connections by threading Twitter into LinkedIn.

Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Thoughts?

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http://www.ConversationRate.com Rick Galan

I 100% agree. Any time you broadcasting the same message to different networks, you are going to run into trouble. Most people I have talked to that push their Twitter to their LinkedIn say “I use my Twitter for business, so it's ok” but 9 tweets out of 10 it's the same ol' garbage the rest of us put on Twitter. :)
The sad thing is that ever since LinkedIn opened up the system to twitter posting, the value of everyone's stream has gone down because of the level of noise that is now there. :(
http://jenfongspeaks.com Jennifer Fong

I wholeheartedly agree on the Twitter link. I personally only link selected tweets using the #in symbol, because the audiences are different. (Quite frankly, that's how I feel about all social networks…each one has its own audience and cadence. Respecting that is important.)

Thanks again for another great post.
http://www.xtraxtra.com/ CHorner

This is a great point. I always think of LinkedIn as something of a precious social media tool that needs to protected; we can fill our Facebook and Twitter accounts up with nonsense and whatnot, but I think LinkedIn should remain, in essence, professional. I worry that some of LinkedIn's latest changes, including the idea of “following” businesses, show it's trying to keep in pace with Facebook, but it's such a fundamentally different network than Facebook that I get nervous when I hear they're making those changes. You've made some great points here, though, and I hope people listen to them.
http://www.colinalsheimer.com/ Colin Alsheimer

Completely agree Chris. I think if we take a step back, we're all cross-posting too much. Not every piece of content you create belongs on every network. Sometimes, it may make sense to post similar content on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn, but it's probably best to tailor each update to each network, as Twitter users act differently from Facebook users, who act differently from LinkedIn users.
http://twitter.com/BizIdeaGuy Hernan Charry

Nice point Jennifer and Chris. I have talked to people about their use of Twitter on LinkedIn if it does clutter my feed. Instead of unlinking, I choose to hide their status updates if it gets out of control. It is a slightly better alternative to unlinking. Delinking? What's the correct term here?
http://www.nicholasdewolff.com Nicholas de Wolff

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

On the side of your thesis, a business network is not necessarily the place to air your personal laundry. We are busy enough trying to manage our social presence, and I imagine most of us prefer not to be inundated with data on someone else's blueberry muffin intake, or which Farmville animal they are currently abusing. However…

A LinkedIn status update is a relatively innocuous marker, and one of the predominant advantages of an online business network is its ability to integrate a little personality in to our relationships with one another. If, interspersed with the job title and salary range updates, I am treated to a few pithy commentaries on the state of someone's preferred sports team or family pet, I'm not too bothered. In fact, it gives me a little insight in to the person behind the position. It behooves us to remember, at the various twists and turns of our careers, that we work with people, not companies.

So, until a LinkedIn status update begins to run several paragraphs in length, and I cannot opt to be notified on a once weekly basis only, I vote for letting my connections express themselves to their heart's content, thereby affording me the opportunity to understand and appreciate them a little more as people, flaws and all.
http://www.gretchengary.com/ Gretchen Gary

I agree – just because you can, doesn't mean you should import your Twitter feed into your LinkedIn status updates. I've read some pretty ridiculous posts in my LinkedIn feed and wonder what benefit people get from broadcasting that information to their professional networks. While I have yet to unlink from contacts doing this, I have used the “hide” feature on many who flood my stream with irrelevant information.
http://deliverbliss.com/blog/ Tim Sanchez

Most of my twitter stream is business related, but I went ahead and changed my settings to only syndicate #in or #li tagged tweets, or so I thought.

The settings page for the Tweets app is actually what you want displayed from others, not what you want syndicated from your own tweets. You have to go to the “additional twitter settings” link and select the “Share only tweets that contain #in” setting in order to do that.

All better now.
http://twitter.com/brendan_miller Brendan Miller

Great post Chris. I ranted the same thing on my blog a month or two ago. When you see all the irrelevant “@” and “#” symbols in someone's post on on Linkedin it says “I didn't take the time to customize this message to you my Linkedin audience and therefore it really is not that important and you shouldn't read it.”
http://www.mikestenger.com Mike Stenger

The simple fact is, Linkedin is a business network, not a network to just feed anything into. It's like using Youtube to upload videos to get traffic, but instead you just favorite a bunch. Not really gonna work…

I use Hootsuite so I post new blog posts to my Linkedin as well as other business minded info, whether it's a good post I read, thoughts/tips, or quotes (not a ton of those, way too many clutter up streams already).
http://josephsunga.com joesunga

I've been seeing a lot of my friends in HR just hosing down their streams with job postings — it's getting kind of annoying, but they got to do what they got to do I guess.
http://twitter.com/redcrew DeborahEdwards-Onoro

I've had the same experience as Hernan and Gretchen: LinkedIn connections who post their non-business related information throughout the day.

Using the “Hide” feature (displayed in the top right corner of an individual update when you hover over the update) has cleaned up my LinkedIn stream.
Pingback: Diluting LinkedIn with Twitter | The Broad Brush
http://twitter.com/1to1Discovery Juli Monroe

I completely agree. I blogged recently on linking Facebook and Twitter, and I made a similar point. What's worse, in my opinion about linking is that the Facebook/Twitter link creates a tweet with a link that takes me to the Facebook page, where I see exactly the same thing I saw on Twitter. Waste of following a link. I've not noticed. Does the LinkedIn/Twitter link do the same thing?
http://tynansanger.com tynansanger

Unless you solely use Twitter for business purposes, there's no reason to automatically cross-post your tweets. Of course, it's important to remember that employers can see your tweets whether or not they're posted on linked in (using the default privacy settings).

The crucial thing is about controlling what post goes where, which is where services like TweetDeck and Ping.fm become crucial. However, regularly upating LinkedIn with professional tweets is probably a a great way to let potential employers know you're active. It's just about developing self-filter, which is not something that can be automated ;)
http://www.webfullcircle.com Rich

I think it really depends on how you use Twitter frankly. I don't mind streaming my Tweets because frankly I rarely put up things that don't pertain to my business. I think it's ok to RT a good article, like this one and stream it because I know a lot of my connections don't use Twitter at all, so this would be the only way they can recieve this vaulable information. I think it's just your mindset of what you want to use Twitter for, I don't want to use it to share what's happening in my life.
http://www.423communication.wordpress.com Barbara Govednik

“Keep the stream valuable” should be tattooed onto the forearms of all of us who Tweet, blog, post to Facebook and Link In. I'm a reformed (mostly) multi poster. I was attracted by the ease and time savings it offered, which were good reasons for me, but bad reasons for those I wanted to talk to.
Pingback: Using LinkedIn for Inbound Marketing | Media Hunter
http://amyvernon.net/ AmyVernon

Completely agree. If there's a tweet you really want to be your LinkedIn status, all you have to do is add the #li – voila. I've felt this way for quite some time. LinkedIn is incredibly effective, but it should not be used as “just another place to linkdump.”
http://www.nds-gear.co.uk/dsi-cards/acekard-2i Acekard

Completely and utterly agreed. Accounts on social networks used for business and those for personal use need to be kept very distinctly separate. Embarrassment will occur if not!
http://www.superiorpromos.com Pablo Edwards

Chris, Great stuff. I have recently taken a hiatus from Linkedin for this very reason. I see people using it as an extension of Twitter. Until it gets cleaned up, there is no real reason to be active on it. I see everything twice.
http://www.masstransmit.com/ Adam Q. Holden-Bache

One possible solution here is to use HootSuite (or similar app), which allows you to post to Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously. That way any business related posts can easily be sent to both sites and other stuff can be kept solely on Twitter.
http://kikolani.com/ Kristi Hines

I prefer, with the recent updates, to just go into LinkedIn and directly post updates, since I usually update my profile with resources that I think would be good for my business contacts. Before that, I set my profile to only update with the #in hashtag, simply because I wouldn't want my #FollowFriday recommendations to come up all over my profile (this includes Facebook as well).
http://www.webdancers.com Greg Falken

Only slightly off topic: I've been trying to figure out how to display blog posts on my LI profile page *without* displaying tweets. BlogLink is the only application I can find to display the posts but it also finds and displays my tweets because I have my Twitter page listed under “Websites”. It seems ridiculous that you can't select which feeds to display but TypePad confirms that this is not configurable. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog and the WordPress app only seems to work with blogs on WordPress.com. Are there really only 13 apps in all of LinkedIn?
http://thegetintentionalmovement.com/ Ryan Jenkins

Chris!
Good points. My tweets flow aimlessly to LinkedIn so I cringed during the reading of this article. I'm still on the fence if I'll change it. I have a hard time distinguishing what's “business related” and what's not – it's all post worthy to me.
Thanks for the insight!!
http://www.experienceadvertising.com experienceadvertising

nice post…I just broke 2000 LinkedIn connections (not a LION). I agree with your points. I would consider myself a heavy user of LinkedIn for the last 6 years.
http://www.samerforzley.com Samer Forzley

I am for separating social media sites for what they are intended to be or at least what I think they are intended to be

Facebook for old friends and relatives
Linked in for business
Twitter for new connections

I cant in my mind think of them as one thing, and not sure why the urge to have everything connected.

http://stopdoingnothing.com Patrick Allmond

So you would never use facebook to communicate about business? And once you make a contact on Twitter and s/he is no longer new are you going to stop twittering with them? I think realistically that is not going to happen. You are going to communicate where the other side residing – in spite of the tool and in spite of whether or not it is business or personal
http://stopdoingnothing.com Patrick Allmond

So you would never use facebook to communicate about business? And once you make a contact on Twitter and s/he is no longer new are you going to stop twittering with them? I think realistically that is not going to happen. You are going to communicate where the other side residing – in spite of the tool and in spite of whether or not it is business or personal

http://twitter.com/kiwicarol Carol Cooper-Taylor

Interesting that you keep so many notes on things Chris. What do you use when you are on the go all the time?
kylesharick

I've been seeing more and more posts on topics such as this. I am a fan of your work because it always touches on how we must always think strategically in everything we do. All social media networks should be looked at as such too. If your goal for LinkedIn deals with professional development (i.e getting a job, finding clients, collaborators for future projects) than your strategy and tactics for LinkedIn should benefit these goals. Great post!
http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

Paper. It's amazingly versatile. : )
http://unbridledtalent.com Jennifer McClure

Yes!!! Thank you for using your big soap box to make this point! My Network Updates page on LinkedIn used to be full of useful information about my connections where I could inquire about how to help them, congratulate them on a new opportunity or share a comment on something related to their professional life. Now, it's a cacophony full of retweets, @ replies and links – with no context since the updates are only one side of a conversation. As a result, I no longer check my LinkedIn News Feed for updates about people in my network and unfortunately, some useful info is lost as a result.

Hey I love Twitter. I love several social networks. But the point of a social network is to be “social”. Blasting a status update or a tweet out to multiple social networks is broadcasting a one way message, which misses the point completely in my opinion. It doesn't take that much more time to be intentional about the messages you're putting out in each network.

http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

I figure if I preach, we all win. : )
http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

I figure if I preach, we all win. : )

http://Www.greeblemonkey.com Aimee Giese

Posting as guest because Discus is crazy hard to log in to from the iPhone.

But I 100% agree. I view Linked In as my online resume and while I get that people are using Linked In more dynamically these days, MY twitterstream is not professional enough to import there. I am sure some people's are but Linked In is all business to me where Twitter is life.

Aimee Greeblemonkey
Neil

IMHO if ll you ever post about is business, your content becomes everso dull.
http://StanDubin.com standubin

When I use my Posterous blog to autopost to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and a few other blogs AND LinkedIn, I almost always uncheck LinkedIn when I post. I like the idea of respecting LinkedIn for what it is, does and can do and try to keep my “stream” at LinkedIn clean.
Waldir

If at least LinkedIn offered us an option to opt out tweets (or maybe only allow tweets with the #in tag to show up in our stream) both the on-site news feed and the rss feed would regain their signal/noise ratio, which was pretty high before they added tweets.
http://www.gamesbackup.co.uk/ r4 gold

Keep The Stream Valuable is the most important, i had read this and find very helpful. It is really nice to know about this things. Twitter is very popular social networking site as we all know. I think in all sites there must be some privacy sholud be there. All social media networks should be looked at as such too. Accounts on social networks used for business and those for personal use need to be kept very distinctly separate.
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http://www.kylegriffith.com/ Kyle Griffith

Chris I believe that there are two schools of thought on this. Yes Linkedin is for business so we should import twitter feeds that are business related. But Linkedin still is a social network and I feel if we be as transparent as possible and share everything instead of just business related stuff it makes us look more human.

When I go to a business related event or if I meet a business client for lunch, we talk business but we also talk about sports, the weather and current events, so I don't think I will change my approach, but I will consider it and might tweek things a little…we will see.

Thanks for this post..
BTW should I retweet this post to my linkedin profile? ;)
http://carlnatale.com Carl Natale

Unfortunately, it's too easy to link a Twitter feed to LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Buzz, etc. Why bother using these services if they all have the same content?

I agree that we need to keep LinkedIn clean. Our profiles are business cards and resumes all in one. Tweets taken out of context don't fit in LinkedIn.

On a similar note, my account was included in someone's Twitter List “Valuable Tweets.” When I found the list, my latest tweet was at the top with some goofy joke. Yeah, real valuable. I would have hated for that to appear in LinkedIn.
http://www.learnstreaming.com Dennis Callahan

Hi Chris, I agree. We have different activity streams in order to share different types of activities. Linkedin is for sharing business related activities which may or may not be included in twitter or any other activity stream.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” Yes, think about the purpose of the message you're sending out and who is your audience for the message.

I think of this as “situational awareness”.
http://www.ryanhanley.com/about Ryan Hanley

I see LinkedIn as a virtual Rolodex that automatically updates itself when people make a life change. I try to keep the personality side of it to a minimum as personality is more geared for Twitter and Facebook and my Blog (http://www.RyanHanley.com).

I do think that LinkedIn is a necessity for anyone in the business world and I love it…

Thanks,

Ryan H.
Julian

If someone continually posts twitter updates to their LI status then why not simply hide their updates from your network activity feed?
clayhebert

LinkedIn offers the selective #li option to pass only relevant tweets you want to pass over to LinkedIn (by putting #li in the tweet). Edit this in your LinkedIn -> Settings -> Twitter. It looks like this. http://screencast.com/t/ZDg4YjgwNmYt
http://www.ezcreate.com.au eztephen

I didn't have to read the whole article to absolutely agree:
Our social networks should remain separate, because each (supposedly) have differing audiences. Some people use Facebook to vent their personal issues. Those that use LinkedIn for looking for potential employers or connecting with like-minded professionals surely don't want the discussions they have with with loved-ones and drinking-buddies displayed on their LinkedIn time line. Why anyone would connect and have their discussions appear on LinkedIn is beyond comprehension.
http://www.jeffreyjdavis.com JeffreyJDavis

Chris – good post.
Whether we realize it or not, we are all creating personal brand(s) via our imprints in the various social media channels. While they are all genuine and all legitimate, the angle i put forth on LinkedIn (Business, Strategy, Markets) is different from what I put forth on Facebook (Mostly fun and recreation), which is different from what I put forth on Twitter (kind of a hybrid, a lot of Business stuff but also links to many things I find interesting), which is different from what I put forth on JeffreyJDavis.com (mostly business / strategy / leadership instructional) . To keep signal to noise ratio high on LinkedIn, I have opted NOT to link my Twitter feed to my LinkedIn profile (I may have 20 tweets / day, too many), and only use selective tweets with #li or focused updates from Hootsuite to update LinkedIn status. I do use the wordpress app to keep my JeffreyJDavis.com posts in the sidebar of my profile.

I think it's OK to have a Venn diagram approach to your social media presence (as long as the different facets are not inconsistent), but we need to try to respect the wishes of our audience in each circle of the presence. Most of my FB friends don't really want to learn in-depth tips about competitive positioning any more than my LinkedIn network want to hear me recount my latest kiteboarding journey or obsess about the latest Dubstep 12″ I am listening to.

It's all me, just viewed from different angles.
http://somic.org Dmitriy

Here is my recent post on a similar topic exploring why it's happening – http://somic.org/2010/05/18/activity-streams-cross-posting-and-pareto-efficiency/.
http://stopdoingnothing.com Patrick Allmond

Ack! You busted me there Chris. That was my link 2nd one down.

I am not sure I agree with this. I don't see how it is practical for most people to keep their online identity completely separate for business and personal. I know you have a business website, and you probably have a twitter account. But I could not for the life of me tell you what either one of them are. And I don't care. When I follow @chrisbrogan anyplace I expect to get everything – personal, business, etc. On my Hootsuite right now I have tabs for my business and personal accounts. I rarely go over to the business ones because @patrickallmond is the business, and the business is @patrickallmond. People work with me because of me. I say informative things, I say funny things, I say personal things. It is all part of the Patrick package you get.

The other alternative I see is to only talk about business on a network classified for business use. Which platform is that? All of the tools have blurred the line for us. LI, TW and FB (the big three) are all in the grey area of what is being used for person and business information sharing.
http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

I just went back through your Twitter stream. There's nothing especially non-business there. But that's not true for MOST tweetstreams, including my own.

Heck, I just got into a conversation with someone about my favorite Hip-Hop, not counting Jay-Z, so I told them Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, etc.

That won't really help the people at GM or Coke or whatever. So, I think most folks need to keep it separated.

Think of it another way: if LinkedIn is a business network, are your last 20 tweets at all a lead generation for your projects?
http://chrisbrogan.com Chris Brogan

It just seems that, if we're hoping to build business leads in, we will have to better “offers” than our typical tweet.
http://stopdoingnothing.com Patrick Allmond

Thanks Chris. I've thought this out a little more today and went ahead and disconnected the LinkedIn acct. Trying to figure out how to sever Facebook how too. I am always willing to learn.

Sorry I missed you when you can through OKC

Keep LinkedIn Clean

Business Value

Use LinkedIn for Business Status

Keep The Stream Valuable

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework

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