LinkedIn and Twitter launched their Tweets application about a year ago. You can see exactly why they did it, LinkedIn has always been a bit boring and Twitter has been a bit too conversational. And they have both feared Facebook more than anything.

So far so good, the Tweets application is really handy and if you haven’t already done so, I urge you to activate it and see what LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and vice versa.

Setting up Tweets on LinkedIn

When you set up Tweets you can choose to share tweets from Twitter straight into your LinkedIn status updates. Most folks opt for only sharing tweets that contain the hashtag #in – a way for you to control what goes up on LinkedIn.

Others go for broke and set up a full integration where every tweet is broadcast on LinkedIn as well. This shouldn’t be an issue really if it weren’t for the fact that people tend to tweet a great deal more than they update their status on LinkedIn.

How Twitter ruins your LinkedIn homefeed

As a result, you sometimes get a completely cluttered LinkedIn home feed of users tweeting away and probably not thinking about the Tweets application. This gets very annoying and the only way to stop it cluttering one’s home screen is to remove that person from the feed until further notice (or even delete them as a connection if you are very annoyed).

Here’s a screenshot from my LinkedIn homefeed the other day:

I will admit that I tested out the full-on tweet function on LinkedIn for a week. In that week I tweeted about 20 times and I had no more profile views, no more people contacting me than normal. I suspect it did annoy a few connections though, especially when some of the tweets were responses to people on Twitter and not LinkedIn.

How it should look

The homefeed on LinkedIn is very useful as it gives you updates on people changing jobs, getting promoted, connecting to and recommending other users. These are the updates that will make the difference in your networking and should look something like this:

What you can do to get rid of Twitter clutter

When you see an update that is automated from Twitter, you can expect this user to have lots of incoming updates (at least in most cases). The best way to get rid of the user from the feed is to click in the top right hand corner of the update as per this image.

When you hit ‘Hide’ you will get another message confirming that this user has been hidden from your home feed – and you have freed up valuable network update space.

Bottom line

So my point of this blog post is basically: if you tweet more than once per day, please turn off your automatic Twitter feed into LinkedIn. If you don’t, you risk upsetting the calm and collected milieu that is LinkedIn and you could end up alienating your connections.

I am all for integrating social media platforms but we must remember that we use different platforms for different purposes. I hate the term netiquette but I guess it applies in this case. You don’t post pictures of your dog on LinkedIn, you don’t answer industry questions on Twitter and you don’t apply for jobs on Facebook. There is a time and place for everything and 50 Twitter updates from someone on my LinkedIn home screen is neither of these.

Do you agree with me or am I off my trolley here? Please let me know what you reckon!

At Link Humans, we train companies to use Social Media properly – check out our workshops for more details.